In my time at Samsung, we were tracking most of the authoritative state for the factory in a single monster Oracle DB instance. This made troubleshooting systems integration problems fairly trivial once you had some business keys to look for.

There are so many crazy tricks out there. You would be amazed at how much abuse an old school RDBMS engine can take on modern hardware. In-memory OLTP on servers that can host terabytes of RAM completely changes the game. Disaggregated compute & storage provides seamless OLAP capabilities on the same SQL connection instance for the most modern providers.