For others like me who might be skeptical to hear throughput in any metric other than seconds (and is used to large numbers in hours/days being used to inflate), I think millions per hour is actually quite high for 1998.

Assume that means 5_000_000/hour. 5M/hr => 83k/min => 1400/s. That is impressive for late 90s. I was generous on what "millions per hour" meant, but even if its 2.5M/hr that would be 700/s, which is still quite good.

Those are big numbers especially for non-enterprise DBs in the 90s.

MySQL's big breakthrough(not specifically talking about perf) was innodb in 2010.

Just 15+ years ago Postgres had major issues with concurrency as we think about it today.

And just 10+ years ago a LOT of DB drivers weren't thread safe and had their own issues dealing with concurrency.

So nearly 30 years ago? Fuhgeddaboudit.