Yes, hardware has limits and you just cannot have a single machine with unlimited number of cores and disks.
But as the article mentioned, NewSQL is already there. DBs in this category has actually been awhile. I think Spanner's paper was 10 years ago. And it is ubiquitous across Google. So let's just accept that we should think things differently in 2022. Distributed RDBMS is already a thing, used in production, in many companies. Like TiDB(https://github.com/pingcap/tidb) mentioned in the article, Square already uses it to replace some MySQL's use cases (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjqL50qzy3A).
> Yes, hardware has limits and you just cannot have a single machine with unlimited number of cores and disks.
Ok, but it still makes me wonder how far you can go today with a good old-fashioned RDBMS, running native on modern server hardware. I believe you can go a lot further than most developers seem to think, without having to go to more complex distributed setups.
In the environments I work in, it seems people often first check on scaling horizontally instead of checking how far they could scale vertically... my preference is to first scale vertically before trying to scale horizontally. (I am aware both have different advantages, but I'm mainly thinking from a performance point of view.)
But as the article mentioned, NewSQL is already there. DBs in this category has actually been awhile. I think Spanner's paper was 10 years ago. And it is ubiquitous across Google. So let's just accept that we should think things differently in 2022. Distributed RDBMS is already a thing, used in production, in many companies. Like TiDB(https://github.com/pingcap/tidb) mentioned in the article, Square already uses it to replace some MySQL's use cases (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjqL50qzy3A).