Putting SQL engines right on the drive arrays was a pretty cool idea. That let you offload a lot of I/O to the lowest level hardware that you could. That was a

Putting SQL engines right on the drive arrays was a pretty cool idea. That let you offload a lot of I/O to the lowest level hardware that you could. That was a real mainframe-class trick. Sadly, Tandem didn't seem to be able to deliver much else for us. Database-wise, AOL decided to go with Sybase as the official company-wide solution. Don't know whose palms got greased on that one, but I could have lived with Sybase if that was the only problem. No, AOL then had to decide who was going to be their sole database hardware provider, and they selected SGI for that. Now, SGI had some great hardware at that time, but databases is not something they did well. And SGI was not a principal hardware platform for Sybase, so everything that was developed had to wait another six months or so to be ported from the main hardware platforms over to SGI. And that's assuming it got ported at all. And that's what was chosen as the infrastructure for implementing the new version of the AOL mail system that lived outside of Stratus -- Sybase on SGI. I could have lived with a database-backed mailbox store for the entire service, but only if it wasn't done using the combined shitshow of Sybase on SGI.