Sometimes I feel like CTO's jobs are just to sound smart, come up with weird ideas, and make graphs like this that tickle the intellects of their company's shareholders.
What? This is a really interesting technical design post outlining how they use technology to solve real problems at scale.
Well, it does depend company to company, but in a lot of places the role is or includes coming up with innovative ideas and to be smart in choosing which ones to implement.
Did someone say innovative database? PG-Strom with PostgreSQL under the hood (what else?) exists since over 4 years: https://github.com/heterodb/pg-strom
SQream DB - around since 2010
MapD (now OmniSci) - around since 2013
Kinetica - around since 2009
...