There was another force beginning to rise. As developers began to enrich the user experience and shift processing requirements away from limited database server resources, the capacity of desktop PCs increased. IT budgets started to suffer because of increased operating system and application software licenses, physical hardware costs, security-related issues, and all the related maintenance requirements.

Figure 5-17. To enable Oracle database servers to handle an increasing number of end users, Oracle created server processes that could be shared among client processes. This was brilliant design, because in an OLTP environment, server processes remain very idle.

This resulted in what Oracle CEO Mr. Ellison coined network computing. While many have dismissed his prophetic words, modern-day web architectures have proved him right. In fact, vendors today are now selling low-processing computers known as netbooks. As Figure 5-18 shows, what essentially happened is the end user's computer is focused on display and navigation, while all other processing is handled by an increasingly dizzying array of computing systems.