Folks who care about the direction and performance of the Drupal database (and developers just generally interested in database backends for applications) should read this blog posting by Bob Cringley -- and more importantly, the comments written by some folks who know way more about databases than Mr. Cringely: http://www.cringely.com/2009/05/the-sequel-dilemma/ David Strauss and Larry Garfield, as our two current DB experts (IMHO, of course) -- I'd especially like you to digest the more pertinent comments and think about how we can simplify our database access, and hence optimize our performance. I'm about to go off an research Hadoop a bit, but my gut feeling is the comments which say SSD and proper, simple use of SQL and good data paths will be the right answer for the next decade or so are probably on the right mark. ..chris