Partitioning is what differentiates scaling-out from scaling-up, isn't it? I thought so too until I read Pat Helland's blog post on Hyder, a research database at Microsoft, in which the database is the log, no partitioning is required, and the database is multi-versioned. Not much is available on Hyder. There's the excellent summary post from Mr. Helland and these documents: Scaling Out without Pa