&gt; [meme]You can&#x27;t simply use a second machine&#x2F;instance.<p>I&#x27;m assuming [meme] is shorthand “overly-broad assertion”? It&#x27;s nice if your database has horizontal scaling built in but it&#x27;s not like we don&#x27;t have an entire generation of successful companies who had application-level sharding logic either by necessity or because they found the control it offered was valuable compared to the built-in generic logic.<p>&gt; While it&#x27;s true that most companies will be fine in 256GB ram, we were talking about sharding, which it doesn&#x27;t have.<p>You still haven&#x27;t supported the assertion that it&#x27;s common for places to have massive, heavily-queried databases like this which would not be better split following natural application-level boundaries. This is particularly relevant when discussing AWS as some of the common reasons for keeping everything in one database are sweet-spots for other services (e.g. migrating data for long-term historical reporting over to RedShift).<p>Again, I&#x27;m not questioning that integrated sharding would have its uses – only your sweeping assertion that this is a likely problem for most people and that it&#x27;s a dead-end (“you&#x27;re stuck”) rather than merely one of many growing pains which you&#x27;ll deal with on a successful product. In particular, it&#x27;s unlikely that everyone will have the same right answer at that scale since access patterns vary widely.