I'm currently managing a MySQL database on Amazon's cloud infrastructure that has grown to 160 GB. Query performance is fine. What has become a nightmare is backups, restores, adding slaves, or anything else that deals with the whole dataset, or even DDL on large tables. Getting a clean import of a dump file has become problematic. In order to make the process stable enough to automate, various choices needed to be made to prioritize stability over performance. If we ever had to recover from a disaster using a SQL backup, we'd be down for days.

Horizontally scaling SQL is also pretty painful, and in most cases leads to using it in ways you probably did not intend when you chose to put your data in SQL in the first place. Shards, read slaves, multi-master, et al, they are all really shitty solutions that add complexity to everything you ever do with the DB, and not one of them solves the problem; only mitigates it in some ways. I would strongly suggest looking at moving some of your data out of MySQL (or really any SQL) when you start approaching a dataset of a size where these types of things become an issue.

更新:几年后，我们的数据集已经增长到大约800 GiB。此外，我们还有一个200+ GiB的表和其他一些50-100 GiB的表。我之前说的都成立。它的性能仍然很好，但运行完整数据集操作的问题变得更糟了。

The database size does matter. If you have more than one table with more than a million records, then performance starts indeed to degrade. The number of records does of course affect the performance: MySQL can be slow with large tables. If you hit one million records you will get performance problems if the indices are not set right (for example no indices for fields in "WHERE statements" or "ON conditions" in joins). If you hit 10 million records, you will start to get performance problems even if you have all your indices right. Hardware upgrades - adding more memory and more processor power, especially memory - often help to reduce the most severe problems by increasing the performance again, at least to a certain degree. For example 37 signals went from 32 GB RAM to 128GB of RAM for the Basecamp database server.

查询性能主要取决于它需要扫描的记录数，索引在其中起着很高的作用，索引数据大小与行数和索引数成正比。

带有索引字段条件和完整值的查询通常会在1毫秒内返回，但是starts_with, in, Between，显然包含条件可能需要更多的时间和更多的记录来扫描。

此外，您还将面临DDL的许多维护问题，如ALTER, DROP将缓慢且难以处理更多的实时流量，即使是添加索引或新列。

一般来说，建议将数据库集群到所需的尽可能多的集群中(500GB将是一个通用的基准，正如其他人所说，它取决于许多因素，并且可以根据用例而变化)，这样可以提供更好的隔离性，并提供扩展特定集群的独立性(更适合B2B情况)

这取决于您的查询和验证。

例如，我处理过一个包含10万种药物的表格，表格中每个药物都有一个超过15个字符的列通用名。我输入了一个查询来比较两个表格之间药物的通用名。查询需要更多的时间来运行。同样，如果使用药物索引，使用id列(如上所述)比较药物，只需要几秒钟。

谈论“数据库性能”有点毫无意义，“查询性能”在这里是一个更好的术语。答案是:这取决于查询，它所操作的数据，索引，硬件等。您可以了解将要扫描多少行，以及使用EXPLAIN语法将使用哪些索引。

2GB并不算真正的“大”数据库——它更像是一个中等大小的数据库。

I once was called upon to look at a mysql that had "stopped working". I discovered that the DB files were residing on a Network Appliance filer mounted with NFS2 and with a maximum file size of 2GB. And sure enough, the table that had stopped accepting transactions was exactly 2GB on disk. But with regards to the performance curve I'm told that it was working like a champ right up until it didn't work at all! This experience always serves for me as a nice reminder that there're always dimensions above and below the one you naturally suspect.