The design of the upper lever database has experienced several rounds of development and transformation to adapt to the changing architecture of the underlying storage system. In the big data era, the emergence of the novel non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies, which exhibit a series of non-volatile (persistent writes), high-capacity, low-latency and byte-addressable characteristics, has brought significant impact on traditional database systems, especially for techniques related to storage and transaction processing. First, in this paper, the phylogeny and development trend of the OLTP database along with the storage subsystem is introduced. Then, the non-volatile memory technology which affects the upper data management system design is reviewed along with an analysis on the domain-oriented and the NVM-oriented transaction technologies. Finally, challenges and opportunities are addressed for the NVM-oriented OLTP database.