DB2, Teradata and Oracle users regularly tackle problems 100x larger than MySQL can handle.
It's not that I don't believe that Oracle can scale better than MySQL, it's just that I haven't seen any convincing data that it can scale so much better that it's worth the cost. I'm no expert, so maybe the data exists. I just haven't seen it.
Seeing the amount of ugly hacks people are willing to come up with and employ and features they are willing to cut, just to handle trivial loads, kinda makes me think that MySQL can only be considered free if your time is worthless.
Also that he says SQL database and not relational database. The whole article reeks of inexperience.
The retail price (I know discounts can be negotiated, but for a point of reference...) for MS SQL Server Standard edition is $5000, enterprise edition is $25000. I have never had to research Oracle prices but I understand they run even higher.
I worked as an MS SQL Server DBA for a while for a mid-sized company, and I wrote and employed some "ugly hacks" to emulate some of the Enterprise features because management at the time was unwilling/unable to pay for Enterprise Edition.
Google is one of those excellent examples of a non-sql datastore that works just fine and seems to blow the socks of anything the competition has come up with to date.
It is not a point of whether or not it is expensive. Scaling (nearly) always has expense associated with it. The issue is how much expense, and with some applications it is significantly less with one of the "no-SQL" solutions.
But deciding to build a system from the beginning on something non-relational because someday you may have to accommodate that kind of scale is an example of premature optimization. The vast majority of features you get with SQL are going to outweigh the limitations of noSQL.
You are making it sound as though a relational database is the correct choice barring any scaling. Perhaps you have not yet thoroughly evaluated some of the alternatives out there, because in many applications, there would be no step back from *SQL.
I feel like the propaganda here is that because RDBMS doesn't scale to youtube or google scale they suck and that's not true. Like SQL is a waste of time because at some point, you're going to need to shard your database.
Look, at that kind of scale, you're going to have problems with any solution to any problem. Handling that kind of scale is going to be expensive no matter what solution you implement, whether it's map/reduce or flat files or some other solution.
But deciding to build a system from the beginning on something non-relational because someday you may have to accommodate that kind of scale is an example of premature optimization. The vast majority of features you get with SQL are going to outweigh the limitations of noSQL.
I've worked on some pretty high scale systems built on SQL and yes, there are problems, but there's just something irrational going on here and it's off-putting. It's like we are throwing out the baby with the bath water or something.