Comment by jasonwatkinspdx

A relative worked for a hedge fund that used this idea. They were a C#/MSSQL shop, so they just bought whatever was the biggest MSSQL server at the time, updating frequently. They said it was a huge advantage, where the limit in scale was more than offset by productivity.

I think it's an underrated idea. There's a lot of people out there building a lot of complexity for datasets that in the end are less than 100 TB.

But it also has limits. Infamously Twitter delayed going to a sharded architecture a bit too long, making it more of an ugly migration.