[ghshephard]

With the possible exception of life safety systems, credit card processing, stock exchanges, and other "High $ per second applications" - I just don't see getting HA right on transactional databases as worth the effort. Properly rehearsed, a good Ops/DBA (and, in the right environment) NOC team can execute a decent failover in just a few minutes - and there aren't that many environments (with the exceptions listed above) - that can't take two or three 5 minute outages a year.

The alternative is your HA manager decides to act wacky on you, and your database downtime is extended.

For some reason - this rarely (almost never, in my practical experience) is a problem with HA systems in networking. With just a modicum of planning, HA Routers, Switches, and Load Balancers Just Seem to Work (tm).

Likewise, HA Storage arrays are bullet proof to the point at which a lot of reasonably conservative companies are comfortable picking up a single array/frame.

But HA transactional databases - still don't seem to be there.