The Rise and Fall (and Rise?) of the HTAP Database
This blog post chronicles the journey of the HTAP (Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing) database. From the 1970s, when a single database handled all transactions and analytics, to the 1980s' workload isolation, the 1990s' storage architecture split, and the 2010s' rise of NewSQL and cloud data warehouses, HTAP databases held great promise. However, challenges such as the difficulty of replacing existing OLTP systems, the fact that most workloads don't need distributed OLTP, cloud-native architectures favoring shared-disk over shared-nothing, and misaligned team incentives, led to HTAP's failure to gain widespread adoption. Today, the data stack is shifting towards modular lakehouse architectures, achieving HTAP functionality through composition rather than consolidation of databases. This marks the demise of HTAP databases as a standalone database, but its spirit lives on in the lakehouse architecture.
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