It's also entirely practical for everything that's not twitter-like, i.e almost everything. But the most noise comes from people with the (admittedly more inter

It's also entirely practical for everything that's not twitter-like, i.e almost everything. But the most noise comes from people with the (admittedly more interesting) use case requirements at the data store level. So long as your application doesn't throw space and performance away at every opportunity, vertical scaling goes really far these days.