Under your point (3), it is important to note that this has been a major focus area of MySQL. I have two comments to make on it: 1) Peak throughput is not as

Under your point (3), it is important to note that this has been a major focus area of MySQL. I have two comments to make on it: 1) Peak throughput is not as important as consistent throughput (i.e. less variance between response times). This makes it a great fit for front-facing web apps, and we have Percona/Facebook/Google in particular to thank for their contributions in improving this. 2) Often users do not get the performance they are entitled to, because they lack the visibility. MySQL 5.6 and above (and particularly mysql 5.7) have performance_schema to be able to track down and diagnose issues. Memory/transactions/stages/replication/prepared statements/statements/mutexes.. these things are all instrumented by Performance schema. Just today I saw a new query written to show a breakdown of latency per schema/per statement type: http://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/94723/getting-database-request-statistics-on-mysql/94846 http://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/94723/getting-databas...