[mdekkers]

> The answer is unfortunately less clear cut. Particularly if you assume that whoever is tasked with scaling this hypothetical DB doesn't know what they are doing a-priori.

The answer is very clear-cut:

Work with professionals.

[lumost]

The number of professionals who know and care about scaling who also want to work on small scale applications is relatively small. Hiring them will pose a challenge.

[mr_toad]

The amount of data being collected in the world is growing much faster than the number of database engineers is.