Server farms are moving to massively parallel low-power compute CPUs. Having dozens of much slower, much lower-powered CPUs operating in parallel, processing data in blocks ... makes far more sense than a high-end engine.
I believe this will be the future of computing in general. Apps will have to be designed to run in massively parallel threaded models to be able to utilize future machine resources where dozens if not hundreds of CPUs are present.
I believe also this is why Microsoft is devoting so many resources into .NET and Windows Azure. You write for the virtual machine, which then scales as technology evolves underneath. And in that way, behind-the-scenes, out-of-sight, without regards to original design, all of your explicit coding needs are handled however the .NET designers wish to deliver it -- and that necessarily includes data mining. So long as you're receiving what you paid for (software works, users see no delays), then who cares if on the other side of the (perfectly named) cloud, which masks what is happening from outside prying eyes, that they move data however they want, research against your data and code whenever and however they want, examine your customer's buying habits and usage, along with every other company using the Azure platform and remote .NET servers, to create a type of global eye on all commerce everywhere?
There's pretty much everything scary about such a prospect. :-(
Best regards,
Rick C. Hodgin