And perhaps the biggest expression of architectural choice is a hybrid architecture: rather than using a single database technology, mixing and matching technologies to play to their strengths.

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Yet since Boston.com began using Zvents technology in January 2007 the number of events in its database has gone up fourfold, and traffic to the events content increased eightfold.

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He was arrested in 2011 and charged in a scheme in which he allegedly logged into the computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and using it to download millions of academic journal articles from a database called JSTOR, owned by a nonprofit group.

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For example, Schooner Information Technology has software for database acceleration that makes databases run 8 times faster than typical configurations by using boatloads of flash memory on commodity hardware.

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