Limited high availability, approximately equal to the one provided by cheap RAC configurations can usually be provided by NUMA technologies. ...you can't stick your arm into a NUMA system and yank out a server. Ask me sometime how I know. Unfortunately, NUMA is not such a buzzword as RAC. ...funny you say that...I'm about to start blogging about it. kevinclosson.wordpress.com -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l