All - I'm not posing my question properly, only chris_i and neilc seem to understand my question. A lot of people present software implementations, but the cho

All - I'm not posing my question properly, only chris_i and neilc seem to understand my question. A lot of people present software implementations, but the choice of an implementation is step 5, and I'm still hung up on step 2 :) I'm trying to figure out how people made the decision to use that implementation. What factors were weighed? gmail makes the claim that they store a lot of information in RAM, and don't use a DB server. Any good articles about gmail's architecture? thank you! n