What hardware is this running on, roughly? What the author was getting at, I think, was not that you can't do it, just that it's hard/expensive; you need fairly beefy hardware and experienced DBA's to manage horizontal scaleout manually.
Re:SQL Databases Don't Scale
by DanielBMarkham on Tuesday July 07, 2009 @07:16AM
(#691283)
If that were the case, then I think the concluding sentences should be changed.
When hundreds of companies and thousands of the brightest programmers and sysadmins have been trying to solve a problem for twenty years and still haven’t managed to come up with an obvious solution that everyone adopts, that says to me the problem is unsolvable.
That's a very curious statement, especially for HN. Why would you consider needing good, experienced people to be a disadvantage?
Because that kind of hardware+DBA team is prohibitively expensive for a startup?
Hardware yes, but the basic premise of a startup is that your people are top-notch. Scalability doesn't imply building something up-front that can handle enormous loads - it means building something that can grow with you. As opposed to "oh crap, we've got some load now, better start again" a la Twitter.
That simply isn't true.
For me, thousands of transactions per second and 10s of terabytes of data on a single database is normal. It's unremarkable, it's everyday, it's what we do, we have done it for years. And I know of installations handling 10x that. It's only people who's only "experience" is websites that whinge about how RDBMS can't handle their tiny datasets.