I'm not saying that Oracle hardware or software is the solution, but "scaling-out" is incredibly difficult in transaction processing. I worked at a mid-size te

I'm not saying that Oracle hardware or software is the solution, but "scaling-out" is incredibly difficult in transaction processing. I worked at a mid-size tech company with what I imagine was a fairly typical workload, and we spent a ton of money on database hardware because it would have been either incredibly complicated or slow to maintain data integrity across multiple machines. I imagine that situation is fairly common.