Comment by methehack

Does anyone else think the scenario in the explanation is an unreasonable request to make of a relational database? I think that if you've created a design that requires you to update a 50K row table 500 times a second that itself is heavily indexed and used heavily in joins, you have a software design problem more than a database problem. I wouldn't expect any database to handle that and am surprised that mysql does. One has to ask: for how long will it work? Surely the clock is running out on such a design.