Of course the beancounter's scalability solution provides a self-fulfilling prophesy in itself - those cheap pizza boxes used to make RAC solutions economical are more likely to fail than an expensive multi-cpu server. Sometimes you DO get what you pay for. ...it is cheaper to buy a bigger SMP and backslide out of the commodity server savings than to implement RAC...there are 8 socket Opteron systems from the likes of Sun that still keep you in the x86 ISA for instance -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l