That line is especially great in the context of the preceding paragraph: > At the time I was lead architect for the product and felt super-strongly that we nee

That line is especially great in the context of the preceding paragraph: > At the time I was lead architect for the product and felt super-strongly that we needed to address the table size limitation of 2GB before we shipped. I was making that argument vociferously but the excellent counter argument was we were simply out of time. Any reasonable redesign would have delayed us significantly from our committed product ship dates. Estimates ranged from 9 to 12 months and many felt bigger slips were likely if we made changes of this magnitude to the storage engine. >I still couldn’t live with the prospect of shipping a UNIX database product with this scaling limitation so I ended up taking a long weekend and writing support for a primitive approach to supporting greater-than-2GB tables. It's amazing how often one person with a solid grasp of a problem can run circles around teams that are shackled by process and cya and politics.