I always think this when people talk about scaling. You can buy off the shelf now boxes with 48 or 96 cores, 1-2T of RAM, internal bays for 10s of T of SSD or c

I always think this when people talk about scaling. You can buy off the shelf now boxes with 48 or 96 cores, 1-2T of RAM, internal bays for 10s of T of SSD or connect it to an AFA and get 100s of T. This is not even an exotic custom build system, just a commodity, and has been for years. Running a recent version of a conventional database on a box like this goes a very, very long way, with very little hassle because you don't even need to think about "sharding", and you can always add a hotstandby for offloading reads, or for redundancy in another DC, or whatever. Systems like this can quite happily bottleneck on the network before the database starts breaking a sweat. Remember, sharding isn't scaling the database. Sharding is admitting your database can't scale so you're offloading the problem to another layer.