Environmental Footprints of Query Processing: A Vision for Sustainable Database Architectures

Database systems underpin modern computing infrastructure, yet their environmental impact remains a significant blind spot in both industry and research. As data volumes grow exponentially, the energy consumption, carbon emissions, and water usage of database operations increasingly threaten global sustainability goals. Our paper explores this multidimensional environmental footprint and proposes a vision where sustainability becomes a first-class design criterion alongside traditional performance metrics. We reimagine database architectures that incorporate environmental awareness throughout both hardware and software layers. By identifying critical research challenges, we establish a foundation for database systems that can deliver high performance while meeting the environmental demands of our resource-constrained world.