I will say though, that in the recent past I started a job at Oracle Labs where I ended up using …

> I started a job at Oracle Labs where I ended up using their database in a project, and that kind of gave me a new perspective on all this stuff. I feel like a mandatory ~6 week boot camp using big boy SQL in a gigantic enterprise could go a long way to helping grow a lot of developers. HN on average seems to have grave misconceptions regarding the true value of products like Oracle, MSSQL and DB2. The whole reason you are paying money for these solutions is because you can't afford to screw with any of the other weird technical compromises. If you are using the RDBMS for a paid product and SQLite isn't a perfect fit, spending some money starts to make a lot of sense to me. If the cost of a commercial SQL provider is too much for the margins to handle, I question if the business was ever viable to begin with.

> few hundred nodes at most, and Oracle RAC/ExaData clusters can scale up that far too and how much license fee it will cost?

Thanks for the insight. A $XX million exa-data system is no doubt impressive :) > Another big problem I found with modeling real apps was the five second transaction timeout. This is not, as you might expect, a configurable value. It's hard-coded into the servers and clients. This turns into a hugely awkward limitation and routinely wrecks your application logic and forces you to implement very tricky concurrency algorithms inside your app, just to do basic tasks. For example, computing most reports over a large dataset does not work with FoundationDB because you can't get a consistent snapshot for more than five seconds! I'm pretty sure that the 5-second transaction timeout is configurable with a knob. You just need enough RAM to hold the key-range information for the transaction timeout period. Basically: throughput * transaction_time_limit <= RAM, since FDB enforces that isolation rec…