Rethinking cost and performance of database systems

Traditionally, database systems were optimized in the following way: "Given a set of machines, try to minimize the response time of each request." This paper argues that today, users would like a database system to optimize the opposite question: "Given a response time goal for each request, try to minimize the number of machines (i.e., cost in $)." Furthermore, this paper gives an example that demonstrates that the new optimization problem may result in a totally different system architecture.