There's more of this sort of criticism in the following old thread, "SQL Databases Don't Scale":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690656
where a few commenters say (somewhat unpleasant) things like:
- I find that this type of FUD comes about from people that aren't good at designing and implementing large databases, or can't afford the technology that can pull it off, so they slam the technology rather than accept that they, themselves, are the ones lacking. Most of them tend to come from the typical LAMP/SlashDot crowd that only have experience with the minor technologies.
- For me, thousands of transactions per second and 10s of terabytes of data on a single database is normal. It's unremarkable, it's everyday, it's what we do, we have done it for years. And I know of installations handling 10x that. It's only people who's only "experience" is websites that whinge about how RDBMS can't handle their tiny datasets.
- Mr. Wiggins article would be better titled something like "ACID databases have scalability problems, especially cheap ones startups use"
How true are these criticisms nowadays? Is open-source still far behind, or is it (as I think) more than good-enough for 98% of use-cases?
edit: Thanks for the responses, sounds like I'll be trying out Postgres for my upcoming personal project.