I don’t have much insight to add here, but it’s something my readers are probably into: Oracle now supports running on Amazon EC2. They’ve got prebuilt EC2 instances that you can just turn on, a cloud management portal, and licensing options.
This is such a cool time to be a database administrator. I can’t wait for the day where people don’t make bad architecture decisions just because they can’t afford to get a real database (and I don’t just mean Oracle by that, of course) from the get-go.
