Preface We spend last five years on HP Service Virtualization using MsSQL database . Non-clustered server. Our app utilizes this system for all kinds of persistence. No polyglot so far. As we tuned the performance of the response time - we started at 700ms/call and we achieved couple milliseconds per call at the end when DB involved - we had to learn a lot of stuff. Transactions, lock escalation , isolation levels , clustered and non clustered indexes, buffered reading, index structure and it's persistence, GUID ids in clustered indexes , bulk importing , omit slow joins, sparse indexes, and so on. We also rewrite part of NHibernate to support multiple tables for one entity type which allows use scaling up without lock escalation. It was good time. The end also showed us that famous Oracle has half of our favorite features once we decided to support this database. Well, as I'm thinking about all issues which we encountered during the development, unpredictive behavio