This article contains a number of fallacies. Storing sessions on disk? Over NFS? In the database? Please - no-one does that. And random MySQL bashing? What's that based on? MySQL is used by many high-volume shops to handle huge amounts of data. (See - I don't have to quote examples either!) And magic Oracle scales to infinity? For the kinds of database setups you need with high-performance web apps you can throw the same amount of money at percona.com and get there as well.

[Edit - didn't notice this was a 2004 article]