no, that's sort of why i was asking for details. I'd be interested to know if postgres or some other open source solution could net us the 10-100x performance he's referencing. I've heard great things about postgres, but I've never used it under heavy load.

I'm under the impression that some proprietary databases on expensive hardware can achieve those levels, and some friends that do oracle installations claim that the total cost-per-query is competitive with open source / commodity hardware setups, but I've never really considered using them at my companies, and it seems like a lot of start-ups are in the same boat.