"Yes, I have thought it through, and no, I'm not prepared to go public
with the details at this stage."

I fully understand & respect that, and that's why I asked earlier. It
is probably best to leave the discussion at this point and pick it up
again in due course.

"Suffice it to say [...snip...] query gets there first."

Clear. I guess you have found a clever way to keep inter node messaging
down and prevent stale data at the same time, in a heavy write
environment. If not I would think that performance will be good for a
Facebook type workload, but poor for a Netsuite or a wall street type
workload.

As said, let's pick it up again when you are ready.

Paul