Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems to be the mantra of the PostgreSQL fanboys. I use PostgreSQL. I have found, in my experience, that it has superior join performance when compared with MySQL and that's what is important to be in my line of work. That said, I'm not silly enough to think that performance = scalability. Neither MySQL or PostgreSQL scale naturally. They require strategies to be implemented whether that be sharding, caching, re…
There is so much ink spilled about going through conniptions to scale mysql and postgres. I really wonder if anyone has actually bothered to confirm that it's not better to just buy some big iron and run db2 or oracle once you hit scalability problems. There are a ton of corporate data centers running oracle/db2 handling WAY more throughput than your web app ever will, and they're not using memcached or sharding.
Sharding, for instance, is a hot topic right now but "big iron" DBAs like myself are completely mystified... Isn't this just the partitioning/shared nothing feature that we've had for over a decade? (Answer: yes of course it is).