> Yes, hardware has limits and you just cannot have a single machine with unlimited number of cores and disks. Ok, but it still makes me wonder how far you can

> Yes, hardware has limits and you just cannot have a single machine with unlimited number of cores and disks. Ok, but it still makes me wonder how far you can go today with a good old-fashioned RDBMS, running native on modern server hardware. I believe you can go a lot further than most developers seem to think, without having to go to more complex distributed setups. In the environments I work in, it seems people often first check on scaling horizontally instead of checking how far they could scale vertically... my preference is to first scale vertically before trying to scale horizontally. (I am aware both have different advantages, but I'm mainly thinking from a performance point of view.)