There's a good blog article on the Xooglers (ex-Googlers) web site about how they use MySQL to run their adwords program. If you're not familiar, adwords generates something like 99.9% of Google's advertising revenues, so it certainly a business critical application. While Google is generally quite secretive about their internal operations, there are some interesting tidbits in this posting about how Google tried a commercial, closed-source database but it was never able to perform as well as MySQL. A few select quotes:
- "AdWords was built using the MySQL database, which is open-source and therefore available for free. It is by now also nearly as full-featured as the best commercial databases, but back in 2000 this was not the case."
- "Many managers seem to have this idea that it is invariably true that you get what you pay for, and that therefore …