A big part of my job is talking to people who have scale pain with legacy systems. I don't know what percentage of the DB market this is, but it's nontrivial an

A big part of my job is talking to people who have scale pain with legacy systems. I don't know what percentage of the DB market this is, but it's nontrivial and growing fast. Most of the markets I mentioned in the previous comment are nearly impossible to be successful in with a single node of legacy RDBMS sitting behind your app. Zynga is far from alone in social gaming scale pain. Consider digital ad-tech. How many ads do you have to show before someone clicks on one? How many clicks do you need to earn $1? That can translate into: The cost of all those DB operations needs to cost way less than $1 or I'm hosed. Enter systems that can scale with less pain. Streambase is a good example of a specialized system that can outperform legacy RDBMSs. Still, it's not like you can say, "All financial problems in scale pain can fix everything with Streambase." It's too specialized. What if you need 100gb of state? There are lots of problems in finance and some of them can be solved with Oracle/DB2 while others can't.