I've been spending some time lately (in between traveling and playing architect dude for our AD module) researching issues around scaling database systems. I've come across a couple of really impressive articles from the SQL team on MSDN on this subject. It's nice to see some of the quality coming out of the SQL team lately, good job guys!

 

Here is an article on scalability with SQL 2005: http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/learnmore/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/ScalOutSQL.asp

 

And here is an article that gets to the heart of the matter: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/dataoutsideinside.asp