[why_only_15]

Google internally announced a while back that Bigtable (which powers Spanner etc.) hit 1B queries/second -- there definitely exist systems with far larger scale (though admittedly this is with lower atomicity requirements and probably includes reads etc.).

[eastern]

VISA does 500m+ transactions per day and Spanner does 1B queries per day, but it's quite unlikely that what a transaction means on VISA is the same as what a query means on Spanner.

[filleokus]

Spanner does over 1B queries per SECOND (but your other point still stands of course)

[svennek]

If it is readonly shared-nothing queries, I am sure the hardware I have in my flat can do that as well..

The hard parts are updates in a shared system with a single consistent "view" requirement..

[why_only_15]

The hardware in your flat definitely cannot do 1 billion queries per second -- that requires a massive, global system, which can probably also support a shared system with ~100,000x less queries.

[rstuart4133]

That sounds so impressive I googled it. It's actually 6 billion queries per second: https://id.cloud-ace.com/how-youtube-uses-bigtable-to-power-...

But then I mulled over it for a while, and it occurred to me it's likely Sqlite does orders of magnitude more than that planet wide.

Spanner's 1 billion per second is more impressive: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioner..., assuming it's returning a consistent view across many tables. But the Sqlite comparison still stands.

Visa claims 24,000 TPS, but in reality runs at a 10'th of that. It would be interesting to see if Spanner could process the same 2,000 transactions per second. Sqlite definitely can't.