We also have the ability to check where a particular consignment of coltan comes from: we have a database of the residual elements typical of each known mine and can thus check material, as with a fingerprint.

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An example of an application that does not work well in a simple cloud environment is a shared database, such as the typical Oracle database application, where the information is one big block of data that needs to be manipulated all the time by many computing processes and where access to the shared data needs to be synchronized and managed.

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The typical big-business database has grown in size a hundredfold in the past five years, bloated by the sprawl of computing systems and applications, Internet commerce and recordkeeping mandated by government regulation.

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