There are ways to scale databases, unfortunately some are limited, some introduce complexities, some are do not fit the cloud...

By scaling solution I mean a solutions that help me scale my existing environment, my existing RDBMS. Some magic or technology that will take my existing Oracle or MySQL for example, to the next level, without porting to a new DB engine/vendor and without completely recoding my app.

Let's try to organize things a bit in this very summarized table, just to get the hunch of it. I can't imagine to cover it all in 1 table or even 100 pages, but that should be a start of a meaningful discussion to continue in next posts:

In my heart, I'm a DBA, always was and always will be. People say I'm a database guy by the way I think, keep my car, and file my music and also bank statements... However I did great deal of development, design, architecture on the apps side. I (hope to) have some perspective.

Applications come and go. The second programming language I've ever learned and worked on was COBOL, some still say most of the world's lines of code are written in this language, maybe so, but anyway I since then have known and written in dozens of programming languages, from Assembly to Force.com, from Pascal to Delphi, from functional C to Object Oriented SmallTalk, C++, Java and , from compiled C/CGI to interpreted Perl, ASP and Ruby back to compiled node.js... My first applications ran on Main-Frame with green screen, later I created beautiful graphic client-server applications, later I had to create hideous white web applications …

For those interested in learning "how it gets done", Raj Narayan - Director of Operations at Glam Media will be talking about how they evolved their infrastructure in route to becoming the 2nd fastest growing US-based web property in 2008. MySQL and Memcached proved to be critical pieces of infrastructure and continue to serve nearly half a billion hits per day. This is a free webinar taking place Thursday, November 12, 2009: 10:00 Pacific time (America) hosted by MySQL and Gear6, register here.