Mr. Wiggins would have us think in terms of "true scalability" which conflates the following concerns: more servers creates more capacity (the classic definitio

Mr. Wiggins would have us think in terms of "true scalability" which conflates the following concerns: more servers creates more capacity (the classic definition of scalability), the business logic of the app is separated from concerns of scaling server resources (this is not possible past whatever limit you set and so has no classic definition) and no single point of failure (more classically formalized as availability). Companies such as Teradata have long offered SQL systems which meet the classic definitions of scalability and availability. I think TimothyFitz's reply above was accurate. Mr. Wiggins article would be better titled something like "ACID databases have scalability problems, especially cheap ones startups use" but then, like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690653 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690653 , it wouldn't get much response.