No, most businesses could run their datasets off normal databases. This becomes more true every year as stock hardware gets bigger ram and disks. There are pl

No, most businesses could run their datasets off normal databases. This becomes more true every year as stock hardware gets bigger ram and disks. There are plenty of businesses running of single-node SQL databases. Not Google's scale, fine, but the same scale as the bottom 99% of businesses. For the record, StackOverflow (your example) is run off a single MS-SQL cluster. It's not even that heavily loaded apparently: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow-update-560m-pageviews-a-month-25-servers-and-i.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow-upda...