See my previous comments about Mr Torvald's lock-free "git" system. The ideas behind this look ideal as a way of running an object store for article versions, images and other BLOBs, and the whole linux-kernel list are kicking the **** out of it as real-life beta-testers as we speak. So far, no-one's found any show-stopping problems with this radical approach to large-scale version management. (or rather, version lack-of-management, since it more-or-less discards all previous wisdom about version control).
I played with an early version, and whatever else I can say about it, it's a nice proof of concept. Fast, too. Not sure how well it'd adapt to this situation, though.
-- Neil
-- Austin