Last year I wrote a tool for a bank to suck in MongoDB data from 5 big nodes on physical hardware, into an Oracle database running on a virtual machine. The id

Last year I wrote a tool for a bank to suck in MongoDB data from 5 big nodes on physical hardware, into an Oracle database running on a virtual machine. The idea was to make it easier for others to write their reporting queries against an SQL database that they understand. It turns out with the right tweaks the Oracle database also performed a lot better, on a lot less hardware. It was one of the things that really improved my impression of the Oracle database product. The article also reminds me of how a father and son went to a Microsoft presentation in 2000, where Microsoft showed their solution to the tricky problem of integrating multile backend servers. Their solution was to have front end tiers close to the client, and the client getting thinner. The son was very impressed. The father said 'that's what IBM did before the 70s!'