Computers have brought the issues of user interface (UI/UX) to the forefront — but designers and engineers have been considering these issues for thousands of years, across many different technologies. Creating and improving technologies is never a matter of right vs. wrong, but rather a matter of balancing the trade-offs. In this talk, Mark Madsen describes a number of the trade-offs that engineers have made throughout history, and then tells us how this perspective applies to SQL vs. NoSQL and big data analytics. Even if you’re not working with big data, this talk is a fun and clever history of various data storage and retrieval mechanisms, starting with clay tablets.