hmmm.....just what I want...all my sales orders stored in ram and not
on media somewhere (he says as the lights flicker....)

I haven't bothered reading the paper, and I don't really intend to.  I am
pretty sure it continues/develops the themes he was enthusing about during
his presentation at Ingres World in Kansas City a couple of years ago.
Everyone at my table pretty much agreed that he was setting up a straw man
(RDBMSs can't do something no one would ever think of using an RDBMS for)
then knocking it down by introducing a new product that he just
coincidentally happens to be selling (see www.vertica.com).

I don't doubt his product is useful for what it does, and maybe some clowns
somewhere attempted to do what it does using an RDBMS, but that is no reason
to suppose general purposes DBMSs are in any more danger than, say, Cobol.

Having said that, I think relational DBMSs should to get over the idea of
storing relations as tables of rows.  There is no reason why they can't
borrow the ideas of column stores to add performance features, and to some
extent they already do.  Just because it makes sense to think about the data
arranged as a table doesn't mean it makes sense to lay it down on disk as a
table.

Roy