As more data becomes represented in graph formats to capture the intrinsic connectivity of the data, the ability to store information in a way that is aware of this structure becomes more important.
The main idea of Tao is to provide a caching layer on top of a MySQL database which is graph-aware, intelligently fetching data based on its structure. It is essentially a replacement to memcache which is tuned specifically to graph-structured data - nothing too revolutionary.
One trade-off they made which I am surprised about is the use of MySQL as the backing storage engine. It seems to me that this translation layer from graph-structured to relational must impose unnecessary overheads, but it also means that transitioning was likely easier and they get the reliability guarantees of MySQL automatically.
I don't see this being influential in 10 years - there's uncertainty over whether we will want to continue to use graphs as the primary representation of data moving forward, and even if we do, it doesn't seem that this work is particularly novel.
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