Big Throughput Traditionally, relational database systems act as a back end for storing
and retrieving data for applications, a process generally referred to as online-transaction processing (OLTP). With the advent of big data, this has changed dramatically. Databases are out, and every hip company is using so called keyvalue or NoSQL stores. Peo ple are opting for these systems rather than traditional databases because they’ve heard that databases don’t scale. However, if databases aren’t able to scale, how is it possible that even the biggest banks, retailers, and manufacturers successfully run on databases from Oracle, IBM, or Microsoft? So, which is it?