Summary

This chapter tried to help bring a number of architectural options into view. Sure, it might have seemed like a bus tour through Rome where the driver only gestures out the window as he describes the 2000-year-old architecture in broken English, but I hope you got a pretty good understanding of the issues developers face when choosing a useful, scalable, and adequately performant architecture. I hope you understand by now that the choice of application architecture is gated by what you have the resources to dowhether those resources are skills, money, hardware, customer demands, or simply time. No, not every application you write needs to scale to support the population of Cleveland or even everyone in your company, but you should consider that if your application is successful, you might have to. In the next chapter, I'll get into more detail on which version of SQL Server makes sense, as well as show you a peek under the hood to see how SQL Server works.