In reply to what Steve wrote re: app level problems with scability: In a way you're right, in that an app written for small scale systems cannot easily be scaled upward to infinity without having serious bottleneck issues. No matter what tool (read language/RAD/whatever) is used, if the design has built in toe-jammers, it simply aint gonna work.
However, if the designers knew upfront what scale to aim at, it's easy. Keys are prefixed with some kind of sub-structure label to break-down the scale to managable levels, eg branch, warehouse, or if requiring specifically numeric, ranges of number are set for each sub-structure, eg 100,000 - 200,000 for New Jersey, with scalability built in with the same number range for each million increase, eg 1,100,000 - 1,200,000, 2,100,000 - 2,200,000, etc (many ways to skin said cat) The thing about bad design is that its faults exponentially increase by number of users. Bigger hardware doesn't help. Developers with tunnel vision don't help. Most of all, patch jobs don't help. Then again, if weren't for all these, we wouldn't have jobs. -- u2-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.oliver.com/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
