just to remind you...

mine is the one with the copy of Oracle 11g in the pocket

And it's "alumnus" (singular), "alumni" (plural).

(BTW, the Oxford Dictionary says that there's a feminine singular and plural: alumna / alumnae. Who'd have thunk it?)

I think you mean alumnus. Alumni is plural.

Just what the world needs a new database manager that has limited features but uses some real cool software technology.

This sounds like technology for the sake of technology, not for any really good, sound business reasons. Well for people outside IT that is.

One hopes that this kind of architecture has been built from the ground up with security built in, oh wait it'll be build on Unix or Windows, so that's a legacy platform designed for single box use, but scaled up into a cloud, by adding stuff.

And what about latency, and systems management, is this really a better way of doing things or just, yet another industry fashion that's designed to serve one particular segment of the IT industry. I expect widespread adoption has been promised to stock holders, and that it will as many things are, be used completely inappropriately because everyone else is using it, so we must too.

I assume they mean some intangible part of the system where we don't know or understand – so ideally suited to selling to heads of big companies

When *you* are in the cloud, its no longer a cloud, its just fog.

Sounds like a great place to do some computing.

Mines the slicker with the hood.