—Big data revolution has created an unprecedented demand for intelligent data management solutions on a large scale. While data management has traditionally been used as a synonym for relational data processing, in recent years a new group popularly known as NoSQL databases have emerged as a competitive alternative. There is a pressing need to gain greater understanding of the characteristics of modern databases to architect targeted computers. In this paper, we investigate four popular NoSQL/SQL-style databases and evaluate their hardware performance on modern computer systems. Based on data collected from real hardware, we evaluate how efficiently modern databases utilize the underlying systems and make several recommendations to improve their performance efficiency. We observe that performance of modern databases is severely limited by poor cache/memory performance. Nonetheless, we demonstrate that dynamic execution techniques are still effective in hiding a significant fractio...