Twitter isn't a typical company. I assume they have both a budget and competent management that will let them get away with something like the Lambda architecture.
I reckon it's a lot harder to scale to even a terabyte under the constraints of a grubby setting like a datawarehouse for some instrument monitoring company.
Those guys will allow at best MS SQL for storage, and won't mind putting their developers through hell.
'Bigness' of data != data size
'Bigness' of data == data size / budget
Twitter isn't a typical company. I assume they have both a budget and competent management that will let them get away with something like the Lambda architecture.
I reckon it's a lot harder to scale to even a terabyte under the constraints of a grubby setting like a datawarehouse for some instrument monitoring company.
Those guys will allow at best MS SQL for storage, and won't mind putting their developers through hell.