[nonethewiser]

It's amusing to me that this is really quite a pedantic observation yet it's driving very earnest engagement from hackernews. Myself included. Absolutely nothing in this article is riding on if its 1 or 2 problems - it's an aside at best. Yet I'm still trying to think through if it's 1 or 2. I mean, the "and" is right there - that clearly suggests two. It's almost comical even, to say "Here is one problem: X and Y." Yet in another way it seems like 2 sides of the same coin.

I guess there is a rather fine line between philosophy and pedantry.

Maybe we can think about it from another angle. If they are 2 problems databases were designed to solve, then that means this is a problem databases were designed to solve: storing data persistently.

Is that really a problem database were designed to solve? Not really. We had that long before databases. It was already solved. It's a pretty fundamental computer operation. Isn't it fair to say this is one thing? "Storing data so it can be retrieved efficiently."