[fendale]

As another 'Oracle guy' this is an interesting post. I have said before on here, if you pay for Oracle, and also pay for decent storage arrays, Oracle can shift a serious amount of data before it reaches its limit. In my opinion, it really seems to be an order of magnitude better than its closest open source competitor.

[jacques_chester]

I have to admit that when I hear "relational doesn't scale", I usually rewrite it in my head as "MySQL doesn't scale".

Because people have been running massive systems on Oracle, DB2, Sybase, TeraData etc for years now.

[mkjones]

I think when people say "relational doesn't scale," what they mean is "MySQL often requires application-level changes to scale out."

I assume (among this crowd, anyway) that scaling out is more desirable vs. scaling up because the majority of the hardware costs are variable, whereas scaling up requires a step function of large cash investments that startups often can't afford.

Do those massive systems on Oracle etc scale out, or simply scale up with expensive hardware?

[fendale]

You can certainly scale out with Oracle RAC. At some point the bottleneck will likely be disk however, so buying a high end storage system would probably become priority.

[jacques_chester]

> Do those massive systems on Oracle etc scale out, or simply scale up with expensive hardware?

Both. If you still need ACID guarantees and want hundreds of thousands (or even millions, if necessary) of TPM, you will need to pay the piper.