This is somewhat orthogonal to the topic of threading but relevant to the use of resources.
If we are going to undertake some hard problems perhaps we should be looking at other problems that solve other long term issues before we commit to spending resources on changing the process model.
One thing I can think of is upgrading. AFAIK dump and restore is the only way to change the on disk format.
Presuming that eventually we will be forced to change the on disk format it would be nice to be able to do so in a manner which does not force long down times
Dave
