Diskless databases: What happens when storage isn’t the bottleneck

In 2021, I was developing software for an aerospace manufacturer and met with our machine learning team to discuss innovative approaches for tracking FOD (free-orbiting debris), a major security and operational concern in the industry. What struck me wasn’t the algorithms or tracking equipment, but the terabytes of data (up to petabytes) that were being produced. Old-school problems of limited hardware resources and inefficient data compression were bottlenecking cutting-edge visual learning...