On Wed, Mar 5, 2025 at 9:44 PM me nefcanto <sn.1361@gmail.com> wrote:
I once worked with a monolithic SQL Server database with more than 10 billion records and about 8 Terabytes of data. A single backup took us more than 21 days. It was a nightmare.
25 years ago (meaning much slower hardware), I managed a 1TB database. Backups took about 4 hours. Could have gotten it down to two hours if I'd wanted to use more tape drives.
Right now, I manage a 5TB database. Backups take 110 minutes, and that's when using one channel for all IO, writing to not the fastest NAS, and other 3+TB databases backing up to it at the same time.
Almost everybody knows that scaling up has a ceiling
And that ceiling is much, much higher than you think it is.
, but scaling out has no boundaries.
Except for complexity and fragility. I bet I could get good scaled up performance out of the amount of hardware you're using to scale out.
