[mahmud]

good point, but as engineering trade offs go; do you want to tie your application's performance to one RDBMS' non-standard hacks; or do you want to throw cheap hardware, ram, fat pipes and caches at the problem? I can scale my lousy middleware-as-calculator solution with something as cheap as running data consumers and producers on the same machine, or as "expensive" as a gigabit switch and a fat cable. What would you gain from a beefy RDBMS that you couldn't get done with sharded db wisely spread across machines?