It was once said that the mother of invention was necessity. I would say that the mother of invention is actually laziness - or is it that innate desire in all of us to sleep at night.

When you deal with VLDB's (hundreds of TB) you will want to use all of the tools you can to keep the thing running. The side-effect is that you get to sleep at night...

Can you detect a common theme here

And if Larry has his way, the db becoming self-aware may not be that far off lol