Check out this Slashdot article. It talks about a clustered DB system from ObjectWeb called C-JDBC. Its for clustering a lot of database systems together and make you able to have a cluster of cheap DB Systems and allow speed increeses and reliability. Interesting idea. From what i can gather its only working with Java clients and Serverlets. Would be nice to get PHP working. i could have my workstation and server acting as a DB server and make things a lot faster!