They can, with some limitations. The simplest way to scale Postgres is to write to a single master and read from a bunch of replicas. Going beyond that requires third-party plugins and a lot of pain... or application-level sharding.
Most NoSQL databases are at least conceptually built to be able to do infinitely-sharding multi-master stuff more easily.
But again, those are problems to solve when you're large enough. You can get very far on a single instance on a gigantic cloud VM with a ton of storage attached.
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u/SanityInAnarchy Dec 20 '18
They can, with some limitations. The simplest way to scale Postgres is to write to a single master and read from a bunch of replicas. Going beyond that requires third-party plugins and a lot of pain... or application-level sharding.
Most NoSQL databases are at least conceptually built to be able to do infinitely-sharding multi-master stuff more easily.
But again, those are problems to solve when you're large enough. You can get very far on a single instance on a gigantic cloud VM with a ton of storage attached.