> thus may not be as reliant on databases in the same way as a newer company. I think my perspective on this is a tad different. The world is changing and has

> thus may not be as reliant on databases in the same way as a newer company. I think my perspective on this is a tad different. The world is changing and has changed because of computing. At this point, on some level, every big business needs to effectively leverage technology to compete. The difference, I think, between the infrastructure needs of digital information companies which operate on those massive data scales vs other business has a lot to do with the timescales of notable events that need to be processed. If you want to track every keystroke or page load of every user where users number in the hundreds of millions, sure, that's the sort of problem where getting the data layout finely tuned is valuable. If your problem is tracking sensors on thousands of trains or, even surprisingly, every credit card transaction or retail banking operation, the scales are a lot smaller. How many times a day do you use your bank account vs send a slack message or receive a notification? My guess is that it's a few orders of magnitude off. For what it's worth, there's a reason companies like Oracle and IBM have been making a boat load of money for a very long time. Those databases don't scale horizontally, but most businesses aren't growing in the rate of data creation that they are doing in a way that needs it. The advent of the cloud is slowly gaining traction in industries which have long had large IT budgets going to products people on this forum tend not to talk about because, in part, they aren't easy technologies to access if you aren't in an enterprise setting. All this being said, there are "new" companies doing real things that are global and mission critical but are building services where the request rate is on the order of human action rather than computer action.