[throwawaaarrgh]

Most databases are still kinda crap. Either it's hard to scale them or maintain them, hard to know the right way to use them, or they strip out useful functionality for the sake of simplicity, forcing reinventing the wheel. We haven't got much actually novel design since like 2006. There's some people trying to bolt on top of/around/under existing databases for backwards compatibility or to avoid reinventing, but not really much actual novel design for a whole database.

Computer Science research seems to either be fully academic, where research into practical solutions doesn't happen, or it's limited to private companies trying to solve one business problem. Very little actual advancement of the state of the art, or solving of long standing limitations.