[sanxiyn]

I think it is not RDBMS, rather combinatorial explosion of configuration/flag/option/platform is insidious and we, software engineering as a field, don't know how to do it well.

I think it is one of the largest impact problem in software engineering if it can be improved. Maybe a way to restrict flag interaction and reduce support and test matrix as a result.

[jiggawatts]

Something I enjoyed was listening to the talks by the LibreSSL team cleaning up the mess in OpenSSL that (in part) caused the Heartbleed bug.

One of their strategies was to drop the macro soup and simply program against the "libc we would like to have", and then add compatibility shims to materialise their ideal libc instead of conditional compilation at the point of use.