Scale and performance are two highly complex challenges facing nearly every database administrator, whether your systems are in the cloud or on-premises. People often see scalability and performance as the same problem, but they are not. Performance is the ability of the system to respond to queries within an expected time. Scalability is the ability to meet performance goals at specific workload levels and data sizes. One of the key indicators of success for scalability is if the resource consumption of the system increases at or below the rate of data and workload increase. Performance is therefore a pre-condition or element of scalability. A system that performs poorly will almost always perform even worse when faced with increasing data sizes or workloads.