I think plague might be a stronger word than I would use, since I think there is always pressure on new entrants to exaggerate problems with existing technology

I think plague might be a stronger word than I would use, since I think there is always pressure on new entrants to exaggerate problems with existing technology. For example: I have several customers with 200TB databases on a single server. I helped a customer a few weeks ago insert 50K/queries/s sustained on some not particularly special hardware (higher is possible; depends a lot on schema+indexes). But back to your question - Yes. We are working on improving use cases like insert throughput, and changing the file format so we can support an instant DDL. Having our new data dictionary in 8.0 provides a strong basis for this. The larger vision is a 4 step mission, described in our Keynote from last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ihSsQ2z-Cc&feature=youtu.be&t=2707 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ihSsQ2z-Cc&feature=youtu.be... Actual mission slide starts at 57:30. Step 4 is to introduce write scale out with sharding. (Hi btw!, I'm also an Australian living in Toronto.)