Exactly. To handle massive loads, you can trade away transactional integrity and get increased performance AND a whole new range of complicated problems that w

Exactly. To handle massive loads, you can trade away transactional integrity and get increased performance AND a whole new range of complicated problems that was more or less solved for you, that you now have to take care of yourself. For some applications, the tradeoff is not a problem - and in others it requires a lot of work, up to more or less your own implementation of distributed transactions. I have this feeling that I can't shake off , that a lot of people think relational (transactional) databases are complicated, and fail to see why they actually are complicated. This probably is not the category of people that truly need to solve their performance problems though.