For decades, enterprise systems have been built around the database - the original canonical data structure that everything had to integrate to. The DBA was the most powerful person in the enterprise, even messages standards were based on the database structures and it seemed everything had to have a table associated with it. The time has come to think about an enterprise free from the RDBMS - not free from persistence altogether, but free from the lock-in of the classic RDBMS. John will talk through some recent projects at several large financial institutions now building global trading systems without a database in sight.