Comment by mtmail

The solution back then makes sense. It was a couple of years too early for CouchDB, Cassandra or MySQL Cluster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL_Cluster) which are more suited for write-heavy applications and clustering across servers.

Later spinning harddrives were replaced by SSD, then NVME. More open source NoSQL and columnular storage solution. Cloud services started offering hosted databases with unlimited scale. 500GB would all be 'hot' ready to be queried in realtime.

Today I'd see three options

* multiple cloud servers which receive the data and put it into a managed cloud database, like Google BigQuery. They'll handle all scale, including region replication, backups. You might overpay but likely still less than Oracle software licence.

* specialist SaaS for IoT, for example ClickHouse. They can handle 10.000 incoming rows per second. The data store later does defragmentation, storing data by date and other optimizations which make it faster to query recent data, vs older data.

* place it into JSON or CSV files, one per hour, or one day and query with DuckDB.