Yes. Memory can reach 768GB on a single instance today and I imagine that to expand. From there you can scale by sharding.
In memory provides real-time transactions you can't guarantee when using disk-based storage.
In memory provides real-time transactions you can't guarantee when using disk-based storage.
https://letsencrypt.org/2021/01/21/next-gen-database-servers...
They have 2TB RAM in there, and I suspect that is not the largest possible amount if you're willing to spend more money (though probably the largest possible amount for that particular server).
I played around a bit on the Dell website, and the largest server I could find supported up to 6TB RAM, with a price at ~300k EUR (I assume nobody pays list price for these).
This is changing as we discover better ways of coding IO operations.
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/11/05/194114...
https://itnext.io/modern-storage-is-plenty-fast-it-is-the-ap...
I once worked for a company that was writing a proposal for a US Homeland Security IT system. This was 2006. I wasn't involved in it but my office-mate was. He randomly turned his chair around and said "hey, can you go on Dell.com and see if you can build the most expensive server imaginable" – so I did and I ended up at around $350k. I don't remember what it was, but at the time the stats just felt absolutely obscene. I do remember that, at that scale we were buying a closet, not just one box.
And I told him the price, and he said, "They have set aside $20 million for server hardware, and what you configured is way way overkill for what they think they need" – so we were both so damn perplexed because, at least from what he told me, this didn't need that much. And it wasn't one of those classified projects where they couldn't tell you what it was for. It was a pretty boring line of business type thing (like HR or building access control or something).
Maybe that's probably more a story of just how much cash was being poured into that agency during the years after 9/11.
Assuming your system is very badly configured and you can only do 3 gigs per second, about 400 s, so about 5 minutes, which is not very painful