Jon Udell's Vancouver Python Workshop talk on The present and future value of Python:

"The endgame here is a hybrid data engine with object, relational, and XML surfaces. Could you build such a thing in Python? I don't see why not. If you can build a scalable high-performance object database like ZODB in Python, I'll bet you can build the kind of hybrid I'm talking about. Of course, there's not an infinite supply of Jim Fultons. And a lot of companies are chasing the universal database holy grail. Oracle and IBM have gotten pretty far down that road already. At the other end of the commercial spectrum, OpenLink Software's Virtuoso has been delivering the goods for a couple of years now. In the open source world, I'm not sure where things stand. Postgres and ZODB and MySQL and Berkeley DB XML are all pieces of the puzzle, but I don't see any plan for fitting them together."

See also The Register - IBM moves the database goalposts...