http://sqlblog.com/blogs/buck_woody/archive/2013/01/22/how-does-the-cloud-change-a-systems-architect-s-job.aspxI know - I said I didn't like the "cloud" term, but my better-phrased "Distributed Systems" moniker just never took off like I had hoped. So I'll stick with the "c" word for now, at least until the search engines catch up with my more accurate term. IenCommunityServer 2.1 SP2 (Build: 61129.1)http://sqlblog.com/blogs/buck_woody/archive/2013/01/22/how-does-the-cloud-change-a-systems-architect-s-job.aspx#47247Tue, 22 Jan 2013 19:25:14 GMT21093a07-8b3d-42db-8cbf-3350fcbf5496:47247Louis Davidson<p>&gt;&gt;I know - I said I didn't like the &quot;cloud&quot; term, but my better-phrased &quot;Distributed Systems&quot; moniker just never took off like I had hoped. So I'll stick with the &quot;c&quot; word for now, at least until the search engines catch up with my more accurate term.&lt;&lt;</p> <p>Yeah, terminology sticks for a very very long time once it gets entrenched, even if it is terrible. &nbsp;For me the term &quot;physical&quot; model is the term I hate the most. The term means either the tables and columns, or the internal data structures that the relational engine uses to make our declarative language so easy to use. If we could keep the physical model to mean indexing, partitions, file structures, etc, and rename the machine independent model to something else (relational data model?) it would be clearer that there is a seperation of layers (tables and columns should work on any edition of a database server, even a &quot;distributed systems&quot; version, but you may need to tweak the physical layer based on how large/fast your CPU, Disk, and Memory resources are.</p>