Robbie Walzer, VP of Engineering at SingleStore, talks through SingleStore's journey and its evolution as a distributed SQL database. We discuss the technical architecture and optimizations of SingleStore, formerly MemSQL, and how it handles both transactional and analytical workloads simultaneously. Robbie sheds light on the challenges associated with characterizing performance attributes of databases, the growing relevance of semantic search, and the importance of testing for ensuring database reliability and correctness. He also shares views on the future trajectory of the database industry.