You see, in business, everything is about cheap or expensive. It's just a more broad definition that includes developer time and ROI. If your problem is extre

You see, in business, everything is about cheap or expensive. It's just a more broad definition that includes developer time and ROI. If your problem is extremely transactional and legitimately unshardable, feel free to drop 6 mil on exadata. Or a half a mil on a database server and backup. But frankly, your objections are starting to have a religious feel to them. All I was saying is that PL/SQL is a pile of crap to code in and fundamentally unscalable without spending a boatload of money. A little better design can get the same thing with a lot less cash. EDIT: No, those are facts, PL/SQL looks like it was designed in 1965 and, yes, putting all of your CPU processing into a single node is fundamentally unscalable. I've seen it. It was fundamentally unscalable. I'm not making a religious point about RDBMS - it can be the best model in many situations. I'm making a point about single bottlenecks for your architecture.