[Andys]

Agreed - A place I worked needed 24/7 uptime for financial transactions, and we still managed to keep scaling a standard MySQL database, despite it getting hammered, over the course of 10 years up to something like 64 cores and 384GB of RAM on a large EC2 instance.

We did have to move reporting off to a non-SQL solution because it was too slow to do in realtime, but that was a decision based on evidence of the need.