Hi Alex, a big apology for the late reply, to start off with.... Many thx for the answer. Like I said in the question I posted, I am still new with database clustering and maybe I should keep it simple and later get the picture better. One master database, read and write and basically clone or instances of the master but read only. I take it load balancing will take care of the rest .... not sure but I get what you saying....Thx once more...