Humans have always wanted to ask questions of their data and get an answer back before they lost interest. In the earliest ledgers, that meant flipping to the right page. In the first databases, it meant waiting for a report to run overnight. For decades, nobody used the words “fast” and “interactive” to describe getting an answer out of a database. You asked, and then you waited.
We set out to get people their answer before they lost interest in the question. Everything since has served that one idea.
