As a developer, you spend time making choices that can impact the performance and scalability of your application. These decisions often depend on the tradeoffs made by programmers at the next layer down the stack. For example, when choosing a database, you may need to consider factors such as horizontal vs vertical scalability, column-oriented vs row-oriented storage, physical storage choices, data loss protection, and query performance. SingleStore's Universal Storage engine is designed to provide a balance between these competing demands, offering features such as high availability, unlimited storage, incremental backup/restore, automated statistics collection, vectorized SIMD execution, and hot-swapping of optimized results during compilation. By understanding the tradeoffs involved in building a database like SingleStore, developers can make informed decisions about their own application's performance and scalability needs.