Ok, but Does It Scale?

The article explores scalability in databases, distinguishing between three dimensions of scale: compute, storage, and networking. While horizontal storage scaling is straightforward, not all networking and computation can be scaled horizontally—general-purpose distributed databases like CockroachDB often incur significant overhead per transaction and perform poorly under contention. Spacetime offers high performance under contention and provides tools designed specifically for scaling parallelizable OLTP workloads horizontally.