I believe (and it maps to my experience as well) that Brian uses "rogue" as meaning "outside of established corporate standards".
Arguably, MS-SQL reached performance respectability with SQL 2000 and feature respectability with SQL 2005. So... I agree with your statement. However, the "MS-SQL runtime" that MSFT provided "for free", followed by MSDE "for free" and the Access-to-SQL upgrade wizard "for free" did LOTS of help to give MS-SQL the boost it needed... Regards, Michael B. Smith Consultant and Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:mailvor...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2010 6:57 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Whining... On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 6:21 PM, Brian Desmond <br...@briandesmond.com> wrote: > Honestly, having worked in hundreds of large scale orgs, the three > Michael listed are the three you're going to find operating in > datacenters outside of rogue instances and the occasional in-the-box app > specific DB. In a large organization, I would expect to find heavy deployment of at least one big commercial platform as the centerpiece, but lots of other stuff on the edge in supporting roles. You dismiss them as "rogue", I take it, but I don't see why. Take away the small pieces and the big pieces usually grind to a halt. Take away the big pieces and the small pieces are pointless. You need all the pieces for a machine to work. In my experience, big organizations never have homogeneous systems. It wasn't all *that* long ago the MS-SQL was excluded from the "real database" category by some because it was stuck on 32-bit pee sea boxes and simply couldn't scale up to the likes of big Sun/IBM/HP/DEC/etc. systems. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~