[samirageb]

Thanks for the reply Brent, a few points I should clarify.

> Luckily they were able to get the Microsoft SQL team engaged to get them through this.

Looking at this statement now, I see that it might have appeared that Microsoft 'came to the Stack team's rescue.' My impression was that over time Microsoft alleviated some of the workarounds the SO team was running into.

> I'm not sure many teams would pursue this architecture if they knew the effort (and luck) involved.

I was simply stating that the SO architectural graphic looks deceptively simple and I can only imagine the amount of drama on hardware alone the team went through to achieve their goals. I do believe there are other OSS-based architectures (with likely more layers) that would require less 'workaround' effort to deliver reasonable performance/reliability, but compounded with SO's likely SLA & perf requirements on a closed-source RDBMS? It wouldn't surprise me to see some go 'good enough' and move on. I doubt anything is Ron Popeil easy when your trying to shed milliseconds on a persistence layer.

Hope this clears things up a bit.