Ah, I was using "enterprise" in the colloquial tech/B2B sense as a company of ~1000 people or so. There are about 8,000 businesses of that size in the US, but they employ about half the private workforce. It appears to me that Cassandra adoption is very heavy within that market segment, for instance.

(Keep in mind that pushing relational databases to 10k writes/sec is not optimal! Well before you get to that point, there are much more cost-effective options.)

On to a few other nits...

> 10k writes a second is a problem that a very small number of systems have relative to all deployed web servers, the normal case is far closer to HN.

Hmm ... I would estimate that the majority of deployed servers today use a distributed database, operating out of clusters for e.g. Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, CDN operators, and so on.

And, of course, HackerNews is also using distributed databases, so it's not a great counterexample...

> Re HN using other systems for search and api, that’s more related to supporting companies the vc funded - Algolia

HN uses Google BigQuery to support a company they VC funded? Anyway, this is "no true Scotsman"-ing databases.