> It's very hard to beat decades of RDBMS research and improvements
13 yoe here, I don't find this true, in fact I find the opposite - storing data in binary (to minimise de/serialization overhead) and precomputing indices and relations in a simple K/V store easily and immediately annihilates best case performance you could get out of a typical relational DB. I don't work in FAANG so we don't get millions of reads/writes per second, but there's probably more use-cases like us than like FAANG.