[dagheti]

I think the article is (as titled) about the end of _a_ era, not _the_ era. I don't think this article is saying the RDBMS is dead (the author works for Vertica, which I believe is a column-store RDBMS). He is saying that the era of the "row based physical model for everyone" era is over.

Ideally a RDBMS should have logical-physical seperation, and be able to support both row and column based stores (or any physical strategy at all) in the same DB. I think the author is just saying that the next stage on this path will have various competing RDBMS physical implementation strategies as they have such big performance impacts.

I don't think that these different storage method DBMS's are the end point, but a way point to RDBMS technology that can mix physical strategies while keeping the logical relational model intact.