Yet, companies who can pull off those feats are the ones who survive. A 1 TB database, even 5 years ago, shouldn't take more than a week or two to build properl

Yet, companies who can pull off those feats are the ones who survive. A 1 TB database, even 5 years ago, shouldn't take more than a week or two to build properly. The solution I've used in the past, a Netapp file server with hashed directories of key-named files, takes zero programming and a couple hours to install. (You can easily read 5000 files / sec over NFS from one of their file servers.)