Perhaps before this discussion gets too far astray -- or maybe such digression is impossible to avoid! :-) My point in posting this was to elicit folks who were interested in the database usage and performance for the core parts of Drupal, and in particular the folks who I through the past years have observed as being especially astute and involved (and if I left your name off that short list, it's only because I forgot your name or other such failure on my part -- no slight or insult intended). I was particularly hopeful that folks would read the comments, and take to heart those written in favor of SQL, such as those by Robert Young. I didn't want to bias the conversation by injecting my opinion too early, but I'm in the camp that says things like BigTable are really just reinventions of older technology, AND that the death of RDBMS/SQL is not nearly as soon as some might think. For Drupal, I think it may make sense to attempt to make the SQL as simple as possible, avoiding the really complex capabilities and doing more of that work in PHP, where most of the developers actually have some expertise. This is especially true since MySQL's MyISAM table engine is really poor at doing anything beyond that. If we were to move to using MVCC[1] engines like Postgres, Oracle and MySQL with InnoDB or Falcon, then more complex SQL would be useful. Unfortunately, most Drupal developers don't have the SQL skills needed, and even worse, most people are not going to have the ability to physically optimize the database for performance (i.e. skilled DBA person, access to MySQL settings at most hosting services, etc.). Hence, the former course of using only the simplest, most primitive SQL statements appeals to me for Drupal. It's that last point I'd really like to have criticized. Is it possible to do that? Especially in light of DBTNG, where is the line between simple statements and complex statements? Lastly, although many Drupal-based sites are database limited, many are PHP-code interpretation (# of files/lines parsed) or bandwidth (fast JS/image pages) limited, too. My goal is simple: make my hundred module websites respond in less than 2 seconds! :-D Thanks for participating in this discussion, no matter which tangent you're on. ..chris [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiversion_concurrency_control