On the analytical SQL side:

1. I am starting a new company and you have lined up most of your resources to do so, but am still deciding how to implement my idea, so I come to you. The idea I want to sell is vanity phone numbers to existing companies. That is - companies have a whole bank of numbers already in their inventory, and would like to be able to have access to all possible 7-letter words (in a variety of languages to be determined later) that will match their phone numbers. My product is to give them a way to find these words and help them market them, so I come to you for advice. The search tool must return stuff in real-time, and must be FAST. What do you propose I do?

2. I have a large transaction logging table recording several thousand transactions a minute. It's a short term backup table while transactions are being set up and fulfilled, so at no time should there be a need to hold onto anything for more than three months; however the original creator of this process never put in any maintenance, so at this point the table now holds more than 4 Billion rows. The table cannot afford any substantial downtime, and it is supporting our major catalog, so it can't afford any major slowdowns either. How would you go about reducing the size of the table down to the 250M rows it should be? What will it take?