Licensing costs is just a proxy for CPU time on the database, so in that regard it is still relevant to other RDBM systems. You could scale the database processors (vertical or horizontal), but usually it's easier to scale the app servers.
Anyway, the articles point is being taken a little too absolutely in this comment thread. He wasn't suggesting pulling in an entire multimillion row table and sorting it to extract 50 rows. Just that avoiding sorts in the database where it makes sense and deferring to the app can be a better solution. What those situations are could be an article itself.
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Licensing costs is just a proxy for CPU time on the database, so in that regard it is still relevant to other RDBM systems. You could scale the database processors (vertical or horizontal), but usually it's easier to scale the app servers.
Anyway, the articles point is being taken a little too absolutely in this comment thread. He wasn't suggesting pulling in an entire multimillion row table and sorting it to extract 50 rows. Just that avoiding sorts in the database where it makes sense and deferring to the app can be a better solution. What those situations are could be an article itself.