I've been wondering if there has been any research into stateless RDBMS. To clarify: the schema of a relational database is very state oriented. You create your tables, and then alter them over time with your data. Every attempt to turn this into a stateless system that I've come across has suffered from the problem of data loss. A static file describing the "current state" of the database schema (this table has these columns, etc.) does not allow the system to know whether a particular column was renamed, or one column deleted and another added. Anyone know of any research into this question?