On 03/25/11 11:32 AM, Les Mikesell wrote: > Not everything deals in transactions, though. The recently popular > distributed database versions that scale up are more about doing > something reasonable in scenarios where you can't guarantee a > transaction state (where 'reasonable' is defined by the application). > mmm, yes, 'data maybe'. good enough for web forums and blogs. I'm getting really annoyed when upper corporate management keeps saying we need to cloudify our highly transactionally intensive manufacturing execution system where we can't AFFORD to lose ANY data. Of course, when presented with a plan that has a 8-9 figure budget for a 4 year transition to a new 'cloud' architected system (have to do it in overlap or the factory stops til the new system is fully deployed and working, and every single application has to be reengineered from scratch) they cough and sputter. So, instead, we cross out 'data center' and write 'cloud' on our architectural diagrams, and go ahead and virtualize as much of the middleware layers as we can, since new hardware is so much faster than the older hardware the middleware was designed to run on (hey, 8 vmware esxi boxes running 50 Linux VMs is a cloud, right?)