Comment by clairity

> "Use One Big Database."

yah, this is something i learned when designing my first server stack (using sun machines) for a real business back during the dot-com boom/bust era. our single database server was the beefiest machine by far in the stack, 5U in the rack (we also had a hot backup), while the other servers were 1U or 2U in size. most of that girth was for memory and disk space, with decent but not the fastest processors.

one big db server with a hot backup was our best tradeoff for price, performance, and reliability. part of the mitigation was that the other servers could be scaled horizontally to compensate for a decent amount of growth without needing to scale the db horizontally.