"If you want to throw an anchor behind a speed boat, you can do it, though we don't recommend it." There's a weird implication here that once you need disk per

"If you want to throw an anchor behind a speed boat, you can do it, though we don't recommend it." There's a weird implication here that once you need disk persistence, you might as well give up. Group commit and well tuned, append-focused IO can do wonders if leveraged correctly. For example, we've benchmarked VoltDB using synchronous disk writes (group commit every 2ms) at half a million SQL statements/sec and 100k txns/sec on a single box using a magnetic media and disk controller with a BBU. This same config on EC2/EBS will run dramatically slower, but would still be considered respectable compared to MySQL.