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Yes, but that is a incredibly expensive path to go down; so if you are looking at a small shop that has a cool tool but not much overhead you will find it prices you out of use.
Yes, i think so. Maybe the Wiki section could serve as a starting point; even consider looking from Spatial DB's en mass; not just the ESRI/ArcSDE route. There are some differing things you can see for design considerations in a Oracle/Spatial versus what I am doing in my MSSQL2008 system; where I have the MS-Spatial layer just wrapped by ESRI fro some app access; everything else such as Safe/FME talks to the MSSQL direct. That is a deliberate design consideration of my own to reduce dependency on the ESRI layer.
There is my own experience; plus there is a ESRI whitepaper on Geocoding performance tuning... There is this one; esri.com/library/whitepapers/pdfs/arcgis-server-in-practice.pdf but it doesn't have that section; I guess they may have depricated that doc. I have done a few tests with it; but Windows Vista doesn't do the RAM disk well. I need to get back and try it again now ther might be better drivers to support it.
Doing it client side means you will also have to support all the needed dependencies on each of your users machines. Which starts to negate the benifits of SL to begin with. SL is first and foremost just a UI; to do rich presentation of data; less about being a complete SDK to replace dedicate thick-client apps. It that is your direction then you might be better off just using .Net to build a App.
The biggest part is your design; if you are needing to building data that will be used in spatial and non-spatial tools you really want to highly normalize your data; seperating out the spatial from tabular. Just to keep your tables cleaner and reduce the amound of stuff you store in that space.
