You're misreading his argument or are being deliberately obtuse. Well, it seems you're misreading mine now. does not mean it is impossible. I never said that

You're misreading his argument or are being deliberately obtuse. Well, it seems you're misreading mine now. does not mean it is impossible. I never said that. If you re-read my post you will see that I was merely wondering about their claim of not just meeting the goalposts set by Oracle et al but of exceeding them by a large margin. As I understood it their new system is supposedly not only maintenance-free, but also efficient regardless of the workload or schema that I, as a user, might throw at it. And all that supposedly hosted on commodity VMs in a cloud (probably EC2). That's about as bold a claim as it gets in database-land, so if I was reading too much into it then feel free to correct me on that, but please don't suggest I said something that I never said. To put it into perspective (again): I would think both Google and Amazon have probably also thought long and hard about this problem. A full fledged SQL Store would be a much more sexy offering than their crippled SimpleDB/Datastore solutions after all. There's also a good amount of academic research in the area, with Cassandra (Dynamo/BigTable) seemingly being what many people consider the best we can currently do in terms of linear scalability on commodity hardware - at the cost of not having SQL and no ACID. So here comes this startup out of the blue, claiming to have solved all these things. Yes, leaps like that happen sometimes. Google happened, too, after all. But I think my skepticism is not completely unjustified either? Hence my question which tradeoff FathomDB chose to make, to get at least a basic idea about what to expect.