[g0del_was_wr0ng]

I agree that your PG numbers don't sound likely/factual -- the reason for your confusion is probably that somebody gave you untrue performance numbers for postgres or you're not comparing the same things. Is the 1m+ TPS something you measured yourself or "heard from a friend"?

If you ran the benchmark yourself, how did you achieve 1m durable writes/sec on a postgres machine/instance? [It's quite an achievement] On what kind of crazy hardware? How large was each write/row? Did you use the postgres network protocol to perform the writes?

[qaq]

By extrapolation writes are IO bound you don't need crazy expensive things to get to the needed number of IOPS Intel 750 is 230,000 random writes @ $320 per PCI-E SSD. 9 drive config is over 2,000,000 IOPS for less than 3K.

[g0del_was_wr0ng]

Yeah it's a bit more complex than that... The disk "IOPS" number on the box doesn't translate 1:1 or even linearly to number of committed durable transactions per second. You should try this with postgres and see how it goes.

[qaq]

If you land me 30K for the hardware I would be glad to do it :). For writing WAL it scales reasonably close to linear