Ever heard of this term - RAIDb: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Databases? http://c-jdbc.objectweb.org/current/doc/RR-C-JDBC.pdf
Interesting concept with built-in partial replication etc. I wonder how performance is with more complex queries though and how it would work with triggers etc. You could quite easily build your own poor man's version data access layer that use say 5 connectionstrings and when a write occurs you write to all 5 databases (could be on different servers) and when a read occurs you could either on random pick the database to read from or have a bit more complex solution that keeps track of which database has most connections etc. /Argyle