I watched an interview that Casey Muratori did with Tyler Cloutier (SpacetimeDB founder and spokesperson) [1]. One of the points that Tyler is that, given modern CPU architecture with cache lines, a distributed database needs to fan out to at least 50-100 nodes to beat the throughput of a cache-optimized, single node database.

It’s cool to see the flip side of that argument. Planet scale is answering the question, “what does it look like when you DO fan out your workload to >100 nodes?”

There’s a place for both technologies. Very cool stuff.

[1] https://youtu.be/ONxwjqFjP3A?is=awlEJwGLxQmRE25i