One interesting trend that I've noticed in many of the organizations that I've been into is that increasingly databases are being built to serve single applications. The early visions of databases shared amongst multiple applications is no longer the first choice. To a certain extent this has always been the case for certain operational systems, but now the reach of single application databases has grown. You'll even find data replicated across multiple multi-terabyte data warehouses to support different business intelligence solutions.
db geek attributes this trend to factors such as commodity hardware and the benefits of reducing the complexities created by multi-application databases.
Labels: Application Scalability, Database Scalability, Database Sharding, Scalability Architecture