> but for some reason it doesn't apply to most people's databases.

It’s because RDBMS effectively hasn’t changed in decades, and so requires fundamental knowledge of how computers work, and the ability to read dense technical docs. If those two clauses don’t seem related, go read the docs for HAProxy, or Linux man pages, or anything else ancient in the tech world. It used to be assumed that if you were operating complex software, you necessarily understood the concepts it was built on, and also that you could read dozens of pages of plaintext without flashy images and effects.

That’s not to say that all modern software assumes the user is an idiot, or has terrible docs – Django does neither, for example.

> Network round trip? Scaling the instance aint gonna help. Row by agonizing row? Maybe some linear speedups as you get more IO, but cloud storage is pretty fucking slow.

See previous statement re: fundamentals. “I need more IOPS!” You have a 1 msec read latency; it doesn’t matter how quickly it comes off the disk (never mind the fact that the query is probably in a single thread), you have the same bottleneck.