Bill Gates has historically been presented as a boy wonder with prodigious ability at arithmetic, but The Register can expose the myth with its own superior sums. Last week, Gates said that "now we're up at over 40,000 transactions per minute" with SQL. "In the course of a day, that would be 120 million transactions," he added. Well Bill, that's not true. If you multiply 40,000 by 60 to get transactions/hour, and then by 24 hours, you actually get 57,600,000 transactions/day. We know you have this tendency to improve the truth, Bill, to make it more interesting, but this is ridiculous. Gates went on to point out that Visa does "less than a third of that" many transactions/day, and even the NY Stock Exchange doesn't reach that number of transactions/day. His naive conclusion was: "So here we have on a single machine, running the latest SQL Server, enough head room that nobody is going to have to worry whether they reach those limitations". Does Gates really think that a single Server could really cope with the Visa and NYSE load? This makes Microsoft's talk of server farms rather puzzling. ®