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In the response about seperating the HR, Order and Fullfillment functions across 3 dbs, what are your thoughts about maintaining key references across dbs?

An example would be if you have a db that has a user table with a int as the UserID. And then you have a "Help Desk" type of problem tracking db that has a field with a reference to the owner of the problem using the UserID from the "User" db.

Are there any design issues that should be taken into consideration in this type of situation?

Suppose you are expecting 10,000 clients.

1) Would you still recommend a database instance per client?

2) Suppose you have a couple of client database instances spread across a couple of servers. I am not very familiar with clustering capabilities in Win2K. Is providing a fault-tolerant solution still possible without much effort?

I think with a single database instance implementation, servers could be clustered in an active-to-active configuration providing a fault-tolerant and load-balanced solution in the ASP industry. When creating client database instances and spreading them across a couple of servers, providing a fault-tolerant solution may get more difficult because each server does not look identical. Is this true?