On: Stonebraker: Send Relational DBMSs to the Home for Tired Software

[anamax]

> Why do you make this assertion?

I make that assertion because no one actually uses arbitrary amounts of scaling, "in the cloud" or anywhere else.

For many users, the primary benefit of cloud computing is the ability to go quiescent and not pay. For everyone, there's a benefit to handling various levels of load with usage based payment, but the active range is reasonably limited.

All this is well within the capability of a professionally administered RDBMS.

[anamax → anamax]

I note that AWS instances themselves don't scale at all. They are what they are.

You "scale" by buying more and lashing them together as you see fit.

Amazon happens to provide a very high capacity datastore, but it could provide RDBMS instances just as it provides "compute" instances.

[rjurney → anamax]

They do. Its called SimpleDB.