No, most businesses could run their datasets off normal databases.  This becomes more true every year as stock hardware gets bigger ram and disks.<p>There are plenty of businesses running of single-node SQL databases.  Not Google&#x27;s scale, fine, but the same scale as the bottom 99% of businesses.<p>For the record, StackOverflow (your example) is run off a single MS-SQL cluster.  It&#x27;s not even that heavily loaded apparently:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;highscalability.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;7&#x2F;21&#x2F;stackoverflow-update-560m-pageviews-a-month-25-servers-and-i.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;highscalability.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;7&#x2F;21&#x2F;stackoverflow-upda...</a>