Heck, I'll throw out the "O" word here.

You might even want to look at Oracle 10G grid computing. It may be a better solution depending on what you are doing.

We're just coming off our last Oracle database. A little harder to setup initially, but once it came up we ran for almost 3 years with very little maintenance being required. We hit 99.999% of daytime uptime requirements. And those we didn't were not Oracle's fault (power outages, other network outages).

Just a thought.