Several forces, with impacts so fundamental that they are akin to tectonic plate movements, are driving the commercial database marketplace. First is hardware commoditization: arrays of low priced computers with high speed interconnects which yield the new cluster based computing capabilities referred to as 'Grid,' 'Utility,' and 'on-demand' computing, at price points radically lower than standard Moore's law projections. The dramatic reductions in online storage hardware costs now makes it cost effective for companies to keep previously unimagined amounts of complex data online. This will enable V/ULDB projects with petabyte databases such as online image applications and data-driven supply chain management approaches (e.g. RFID) that store huge volumes of highly granular detail information in data warehouses (with significant history of temporal and spatial interest).