Well, I did say "mostly". It's possible that "partially" is more accurate. I don't have direct performance comparison between the two but would certainly like to. My point is that something designed from the ground up for a particular task 'should' perform better than something that is adapted from existing technology. Again, I can't say whether that is true in this case. The Neteeza appliance is designed around modules with a CPU, custom ASIC chip and hard drive. There are around 200 modules (could be more or less depending on configuration), each processing 0.5% of the data and passing the results to another CPU for consolidation. To me that is a better architecture for certain types of applications. Then there's the columnar database people (Vertica) that will tell you their architecture is better still. Keith >>> The customized hardware is built for that while Oracle's architecture is > mostly a >>> reconfiguration of existing Oracle features such as RAC along with new > hardware. > > I must disagree with that statement. Exadata is lot more sophisticated for > such an oversimplified statement. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l