I have a question to all of you, who are interested in advances in this area. In case that we would move into a direction like that, we surely wouldn't go just a half step. I mean that it should also be able to achieve true high availability. For high availability, you can't go with a single database server - you need a failover cluster setup, and that doesn't come for free - not even with MySQL (you' won't get far with 'community versions').  Such a setup would require at least $1000-