>>Databases can be HUGE sources of content for those with the
>>skills or resources (willing to hire someone). Many hardcore
>>blackhat SEOers rely heavily on creating sites using
>>databases.

>Doing what? Setting up a network of (sort of content) -
>directories spread over different hosts (different IPs)
>linking to silver/gold sites?

Databases are best used for buidling large sites, in terms of numbers.

Most sites of 10,000 plus pages are built from a database, as it makes it easy to "spin" the contents.

Let's say you have a database of web designers in the US.

You can create 50 pages, one for each state. 100 more pages, each of the 100 largest US city.

You could also list them by keyword such as "php", "flash", "SEO", etc., and probably come up with another 500 pages.

Buy a database for $50, pay another $50 to have someone install it and write a simple php search script and you can have content for a huge site for $100.

Some of the smaller databases could probably be converted to Fatty format and used in Fatty SERPs. The larger ones would need MYSQL and a php search script.

This would let you have a custom niche search engine, in this case for web designers.

The problem with many databases is that the content is often scraped from other sites and there could be concerns about copyrights of the contents of the database.