There's plenty of innovation in DB storage tech, but the hardware interface itself is still page-based.
It turns out that btrees are still efficient for this work. At least until the hardware vendors deign to give us an interface to SSD that looks more like RAM.
Reading over https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/dis/research/leanstore/ and associated papers and follow up work is recommended.
In the meantime with RAM prices sky rocketing, work and research in buffer & page management for greater-than-main-memory-sized DBs is set to be Hot Stuff again.
I like working in this area.
Btrees are not optimal for SSD, and the only reason we still use them is legacy constraints of page-oriented storage and POSIX block interfaces.We pay a lot of unnecessary write amplification, metadata churn, and small random writes because we’re still force-fitting tree structures into a block device abstraction.
I don't think we're disagreeing. But the issue is at the boundary between software and hardware, which the hardware device manufacturers have dictated, not further up.