I don't know anything about Oracle RAC, but I can bet that there are tens of thousands of DBAs who are looking for some kind of technology that would allow straightforward scaling out in SQL Server. In other words, a real "server farm" or some way of adding extra servers to distribute processing load without a lot of complications or risk. Or is there already a way to do this that I should learn?

I guess scaling out is much more difficult for database servers than it is for web servers - is that because of the difficulty in balancing data synchronizations and locking versus performance with regard to databases (whereas web server code doesn't change nearly as often as database data)?

I'm just wondering if someone could explain the current technical obstacles to enabling SQL Server to allow load balancing similar to what is done with web servers (shown in the scaling out GIF in the editorial).

Thanks!

webrunner