>> Are you familiar with the columnstore index in SQL 2012/2014, and the new in-memory
>> OLTP table capability (Hekaton) in SQL 2014?
>
>No.

Remember the Amazon mantra - they don't get involved in an area unless they feel we can do it better than the competition. :)

A bit of history - the early 1990's, Borland was looking at creating a "Turbo dBase", but scrapped the project. They did so for many reasons - one of them was because they (reportedly) could only achieve 90% of Fox' speed at the time. There was just no reason to enter the market.

You really owe it to your self to look at what's happening with SQL Server - both the columnstore index and Hekaton, as well as SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse. They blow away what SQL Server could do prior to SQL 2008. And SQL 2008 itself was scalable many times over Fox.