title: monetdb in the cloud, scalability, amazon s3
body: <p>i have recently discovered MonetDB and i am evaluating it for an internal project, so probably my questions are from a really newbie point of view. Maybe someone could point me to a site and/or document where i could find more info (i haven't found too much googling)</p>
  
  <p>regarding scalability, correct me please if i am wrong, but what i understand is that if i need to scale, i would launch more server instances and discover them from the control node, is it right?
  is there any limit on the number of servers?</p>
  
  <p>the other point is about storage, is it possible to use amazon S3 to back MonetDB readonly instances?</p>
  
  <p><strong>update</strong> we would need to store a massive amount of Call Detail Records from different sources, on a read-only basis. We would aggregate/reduce that data for the day-to-day operation, accessing the bigger tables only when the full detail is required. 
  We would store the historical data as well to perform longer-term analysis. My concern is mostly about memory, disk storage wouldn't be the issue i think; if the hot dataset involved in a report/analysis eats up the whole memory space (fast response times needed, not sure about how memory swapping would impact), i would like to know if i can scale somehow instead of reingeneering the report/analysis process (maybe i am biased by the horizontal scaling thing :-) )</p>
  
  <p>thanks!</p>