We originally did MVCC and it was actually worse performance (in our implementation, I grant), but that's what OPs article is about. We spent a lot of money finding out that a lock is more performant.

Calling it a "hashtable" is something that only someone who hasn't built a DB engine would do. It's incredibly naive. It discounts the complexity of execution, atomicity, durability, constraint validation, migrations, query planning, incremental query evaluation, down to zero. It really makes it sound like he has absolutely no idea what he's talking about.

Besides, it's a btree (heh).