Hello,

Our project involves a lot of data transformation,
processing and matching operations on multi-versioned data
sources (physical tables) - each containing about 10
million records. The team for developing and executing
these operations includes 15 people that are working on
the data, each one on a version of his own. In order not
to "choke" a single database server, the configuration
will include a number of local databases for developing,
executing and testing the needed procedures, and a central
database that will integrate all the final processed data.

My questions are:

1) Is there a product (MS or other) that implements
version control on database tables (and not on files like
source safe)? Can this product synchronize the control
status of the data sources across all the databases? For
example, if there is a data source which is localized in
the central database, and there is a need to perform a
major operation on it, it will be checked out into a local
database, processed, and then checked in back in the
central database. In this case, the control status of the
data source should be known across the whole system, so no
one updates it while it's locked.

2) What is the best database topology to use here? From
one hand, the databases are physically located in
different boxes; from the other, they all combine one
logical database. Is clustering relevant here?

Thanks in advance,
Eyal Lanxner.