I was asked a question a few days ago that I cannot easily answer.
"Why don't we put all of our small application databases into a single database?"
Well, There's nothing really stopping us. All of our small apps were developed in house so we don't have any problems with conflicting table names etc.
My initial reaction was to recoil in horror, "No way!" I don't think that I shouted, but it wasn't far off.
But the questioner stuck to his guns, "Why not, can you come up with a REASON why we shouldn't do this?"
Well, how about high availability? Well we can set up a cluster, or mirrored pair of servers, so that's no limitation.
And, no, I couldn't.
So I'm throwing this open - How many Applications should be using a single database?
Over to you.
:)