Riddle me this...

While walking the doggies in my River North neighborhood, I ran in to a friend who used to work for IBM now works for Oracle. He was in a middle of his run and I had two doggies that wanted to walk and do their *business*. So besides setting up some time to hit a new bar after hours, we chatted a little about the local database scene. No I won't mention names because they're in his pipe and it wouldn't be fair. But what was interesting was that I asked him about moving IDS customers to mySQL since its going to be an Oracle product. He said not yet, and customers are tending to go to SQL Server. Which leaves me to ask the question.... Do you consider a product to be scalable because you can always slap on a new instance of the server? Is this truly scalable like an XPS cluster was? Will IDS/DB2 get this scalability? Do you also consider a product scalable when you have to virtualize your hardware in to smaller machines to make things work and take advantage of the hardware. Using the 2 socket, 8 core Xeon chips... you can create 10+ virtual microsoft servers running SQL Server. But why? Wouldn't a truly scalable engine be able to keep up with the processing power? I can understand splitting the box in to two servers because of IDS pricing, but seriously won't IDS scale and utilize the box's potential better than creating 10+ slices to run SQLServer? These are serious questions that have serious implications. If you think them through. Right Jerry? Or has Jerry Keesee left the game and is focusing on retirement planning? ;-) And I would say but hey! What do I know? But I won't because I truly don't know the answer to the question(s) and that's why I'm asking. -G PS. If you are coming to Chicago, check out Hotel Felix. Also check out the restaurant in the hotel, Elate. (They also run the hotel's front bar...) Definitely a nice place to grab a meal that won't break the bank and will even fit in to IBM's travel policies, even if the hotel doesn't. (Just stay at the Drake! ;-) _________________________________________________________________ Get back to school stuff for them and cashback for you. http://www.bing.com/cashback?form=MSHYCB&publ=WLHMTAG&crea=TEXT_MSHYCB_BackToSchool_Cashback_BTSCashback_1x1