[jakejake]

I would think that scaling the web servers to handle 15k requests per second would be relatively easy compared to scaling the database servers.

I would have thought that you could just throw cheap hardware at that problem, whereas the database would be a considerably complex scaling issue.

[jacques_chester]

Not to trivialise your question, because scaling to tens of thousands of database TPS transactions is difficult.

But it is commercially solved. If you turn up with a fistful of money, Oracle, IBM, Sybase and a bunch of other companies would love to handle that for you.

[jakejake]

probably projecting my own problems onto that one, hehe.