Joe Gregorio
Werner Vogels points out Michael Stonebraker may still be working under an N = 1 mindset:
I like this challenge, given that 50X is likely to be able to make impact, where 2-4X in general can be easily compensated for by the next generation hardware. But something bugs me about the challenge and also about some of the demonstrations in the papers; 50X is still focused on scaling-up, just as many of the current database systems do, instead of scaling out, which is what the world really needs. The evidence in the paper is indeed about single box performance. This continuing N=1 thinking will never yield systems that can break through the current scalability limitations of enterprise software, regardless whether it runs 50 times faster or not.