I used a big data option on my last project because marketing expectations were gigantic and the hype around the project was also enormous. Looking back it was

I used a big data option on my last project because marketing expectations were gigantic and the hype around the project was also enormous. Looking back it was a poor choice because the expectations never panned out and we could have saved some time and effort using a more traditional and well known SQL database like PostgreSQL. Before that I had a fairly large project with ~1M user profiles running with no problems on PostgreSQL. I think it would have handled the latest project with ease and could be sharded and scaled when to handle the growth it's seeing now. But marketing was insisting we use big data because "regular" databases couldn't handle such enormous possibilities. I'll never believe that nonsense again. It wasn't a terrible ending but it was more hassle than it was worth IMHO. At least I got some resume material out of it..