This really isn't comparing against Oracle or SQL Server, which are both legacy architectures. And you don't need Optane SSDs; people do better than that with c

This really isn't comparing against Oracle or SQL Server, which are both legacy architectures. And you don't need Optane SSDs; people do better than that with cheap NVMe JBODs like you get on EC2. Also, something is only "I/O bound" if it is literally running at the theoretical limits of the storage hardware. And even that doesn't imply another database couldn't drive much more workload with the same theoretical bandwidth; many popular databases employ architectures that unnecessarily burn storage bandwidth. It is pretty rare for these days for a modern database engine to be I/O bound in a storage sense, even with cheap solid-state storage. Certainly not for fast-twitch query workloads. For most data models and workloads, the bottleneck is either memory or network bandwidth if you are doing everything else right. MySQL isn't typically held up as a paragon of query performance. It is solidly middle of the road. It is part of a generation of architectures that can't get anywhere close to current high-performance architectures. Every database architecture suffers this fate as they get older.