At my last job, we averaged 60k pages/sec, on what the NoSQL guys would call a "legacy" database, and there was plenty of headroom. It's not rocket science, just engineering. Companies like Google love to weave a mystique around what they do, it's in their interests after all, to convince their investors that what they do is magic. But I'm from back in the day when we were the same way about millions of pages per month, then per week, then per day...

On good hardware there were PostgreSQL instances running a billion queries a day back in the 9.0 days. Often these are actual accounting apps where reporting matters and so NoSQL would be a very poor fit. For example the French government uses it to distribute welfare program dispersements. The Wisconsin Courts also uses PostgreSQL at loads in the billion per day range. I know there are larger instances out there.

Now a days we are talking about thousands of concurrent users and up to 350k reads/sec on high end machines.

Yes there is a lurking iceberg of things that aren't in the public eye like Facebook or Google, and that's where the really intense and interesting stuff is happening. I wonder what the guys at Visa make of all the hype around these websites, when they were doing these volumes all along...

At said 60k pages/sec job, you know who we looked up to for databases? Starbucks. Walmart. McDonalds. 'Cos we'd seen what they do, and anyone who thinks Twitter is impressive, well it'd blow their minds.

Have you looked at Postgres-XC yet? It's Teradata-style clustering for PostgreSQL.....