Transparent scalability
I’ve been a DBMS industry analyst, in one guise or another, since 1981. So by now I’ve witnessed a whole lot of claims and debates about scalability. And there’s one observation I’d like to call out.
What matters most isn’t what kind of capacity or throughput you can get with heroic efforts. Rather, what matters most is the capacity and throughput you get without any kind of special programming or database administraton.
Of course, when taken to extremes, that point could become silly. DBMS are used by professionals, and requiring a bit of care and tuning is par for the course. But if you have a choice between two systems that can get the job done for you, one of which requires you to perform unnatural acts and one doesn’t – go for the one that works straightforwardly. Your overall costs will wind up being much lower, and you’ll probably get a lot more useful work done. A system that has to strain even to meet known requirements will probably fail altogether at meeting the as-yet-unknown ones that are sure to arise down the road.
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