> 2 - Why can't you just get several database servers and load the > stored procedures into all of them?
Because they all need access to the same data, and synchronizing read/write data between multiple databases servers in real time is a non-trivial problem. It's much easier to have lots of application servers hitting one database than to have lots of databases, and keeping as much as possible out of the database lets you go much further with that architecture. - Perrin
