[__coaxialcabal]

> Very few BI products have actually surpassed 100 users at target installations. And beyond 1,000 is a real challenge that only few, and even then with a lot of assistance, can support: Tableau, Looker, Microstrategy, maybe Birst, maybe Domo.

At one point Looker was essentially a web application with a query service that could be scaled by adding more servers behind a load balancer. Each end user is essentially working in a shared nothing environment and the query engine is driven by metadata stored in a git repository. Looker itself did not manage cache or analytical processes. All of the real effort to scale was in the database backend.

[segah]

"scale" meant adoption, not performance. Scaling performance can generally be solved with hardware. Adoption, not so much.