Database that can handle >500 millions rows

Question

I am looking for a database that could handle (create an index on a column in a reasonable time and provide results for select queries in less than 3 sec) more than

Answer 1

As mentioned pretty much all DB's today can handle this situation - what you want to concentrate on is your disk i/o subsystem. You need to configure a RAID 0 or RAID 0+1 situation throwing as many spindles to the problem as you can. Also, divide up your Log/Temp/Data logical drives for performance.

For example, let say you have 12 drives - in your RAID controller I'd create 3 RAID 0 partitions of 4 drives each. In Windows (let's say) format each group as a logical drive (G,H,I) - now when configuring SQLServer (let's say) assign the tempdb to G, the Log files to H and the data files to I.