In case anyone missed the acquisition: Microsoft acquired DATAllegro back in July. Press is here http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/jul08/07-24DataWarehousingPR.mspx

This means that we potentially have a customer with a 400+ TB database, and our roadmap will include scale out to a size four times bigger than oracle has ever achieved.

And how will we load a database this big?

well, the world ETL record held by SQL Server is 1TB in 25 minutes, which comes to about 450 million rows per second.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlperf/archive/2008/02/27/etl-world-record.aspx