The traditional wisdom for building DBMSs is to:
1) organize blocks of data on disk, with a main memory block cache.
2) implement an Aries-style write-ahead log.
3) use record level locking.
4) utilize a multi-threaded architecture.
5) Use an active-passive architecture for replication
6) use multi-threading
This traditional wisdom is exemplified in all the major DBMS products, including DB2, MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server, and Oracle.  In a paper in ICDE 2005, we argued that "one size does not fit all" and that a variety of data management solutions should be considered for deployment.  Nine years later, we make an even stronger statement; namely the traditional wisdom is all wrong, and systems architected according to it are not good at anything.
Unless you squint, the DBMS market is divided into thirds, namely On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP), data warehousing (DW) and everything else.  The "everything else" market is a mix of No_SQL, hadoop, graph DBMSs bases, array DBMSs, etc.  None of these relate to…