Andy,

  What a nice tidbit of information.  It's like AWE for data pages!  I suppose that the cost in performance to resew the page back togther in memory for a query with allot of these types of rows would be the down side and much slower, how much in terms of execution plan and I/O would be interesting to know. 

I also wonder which would be faster a text field with a pointer to an extent or a ROW_OVERFLOW_DATA allocation unit, in theroy both would store the same information though retrival would be slightly diffrent. 

Finally I wonder if this is just a hack until they extend the data pages to work with the 64 bit busses that are fast becomming the standard.  Like say to 16 kb or even 32 kb pages like Oracle supports.  Before the back lash I'm no Oracle DBA just know from past projects.

Enjoy.