In this talk, I'll tell the history of the development of ”Urika”, Cray's supercomputerbased SPARQL query engine, from my point of view as the original prototyper and one of the developers ever since. Urika evolved from some experimental ”lock-free synchronization” prototypes in 2008 to a full-blown ”appliance” product in 2012. I'll describe this evolution, going into detail on some of the technical decisions we made, relate some of the product decisions the suits made, and speculate on what we think the future may hold.