Thanks for the notes and I agree with webrunner. Lots of us want to just add a server to distribute load.

Thanks for the RAC notes. I don't know a lot about it other than what I've read in white papers, descriptions, etc. It does seem more like an HA solution to me as well.

ParAccell has changed their focus. They were building a relational architecture a few years ago and then it seemed that they switched to column oriented. When I looked at them a few years ago, it was "add a box" and they had a TDS and TSQL abstract on top of PostgreSQL (I think) to make it look like a SQL Server. They distributed queries among the boxes and any box could query any other. But at the $10-20k per box, it's a niche solution.