Together with that, automated substitution of materialized views for query clauses.
Also: optimizing for new hardware, like persistent memory.
I recently saw some material in ACM SIGOPS on tuning filesystems to play better with some of the new sorts of storage
An interesting such article was thus... <http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2819002> The idea of it was to research better ways of doing hash table updates with PCM (Phase Change Memory) which apparently may be up-and-coming but with fairly different write characteristics than we're used to. You essentially write a fairly large page at a time, and can only do limited numbers of updates to any given page. That encourages things like log-structured filesystems, but with further efforts to reduce there being "hot spots."
The paper was focused on hash tables; if the hardware turns out to be important, it'll also be important to have better variations on B-trees. --
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"