Sports enthusiasts around the world place up to 1 million bets per day using the online sports betting services of Gibraltar-based bwin International. Performance is paramount at bwin which hosts more than 100 terabytes of information on some 100 instances of Microsoft SQL Server. The company was very happy with its deployment of SQL Server 2005, but it enjoyed 3-digit annual growth in 2005 and 2006 and is eager to take advantage of new technological advancements to help it keep pace with growth. The bwin Data Management Systems group has started upgrading its database infrastructure to SQL Server 2008 to take advantage of Backup Compression, management tools, and other new features. During peak gaming periods SQL Server processes 30,000 database transactions per second, while supporting the reliability required by the bwin database group’s motto: “Failure is not an option.”