Ever since I heard about the SQLOS and all the work that went into producing an operating system for SQL Server inside of the host OS, I've thought that perhaps there might be value in specializing the environment for a database platform. Given the importance of databases, especially relational ones, and the need to get every bit of performance out of hardware, I wondered if we wouldn't see a version of SQL Server that is installed directly on the hardware, without a host OS.

In some sense, I guess that's what a PaaS database is in Azure, but I thought we might see that for the download-and-install version. I doubt that will ever happen now with the growth of the cloud.

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