Comment by toast0
1 day ago
> On the other hand, the "unscalable" thing scales waaaaaay higher than you are led to believe.
Agreeing with you... Any reasonable database will scale pretty far if you put in a machine with 160 cores and 3 TB of RAM. And that's just a single socket board.
There's no reason to do anything other than get bigger machines until you're near or at the limits of single socket. Dual socket and cpu generations should cover you for long enough to move to something else if you need to. Sharding a traditional database works pretty well in a lot of cases, and it mostly feels like the regular database.
That, and a lot of companies don't have the scale they think they have.
The Postgres database for a company I worked for (that was very concerned about scaling when they interviewed me because their inefficient "nosql" solution was slow) ran very happily on a machine with 2 shared CPU cores and 4GB RAM.