Hi!
They do. Google ditched all existing database and
built their own
system
to handle their main stock and trade. For some things, they use MySQL,
albeit a modified one.
Their main stock of trade is selling ads, and even though nobody will
ever admit what they are running in publicly, MySQL Conference few
times had engineers from ads that were very familiar with MySQL
internals and did talk about large scale enterprise deployments. :)
By the way, we are running same patches they were running at some
point in time. There's a joke though, about our 'four oh forever'
build :-)
Is it web facing, or a data warehouse? Yahoo is quite federated
environment, but it also has swarms of MySQL engineers there.
Some of properties were running stock distribution packages,
though... :)
Keep in mind if popularity alone was a good criteria,
we'd all be
<strike>happily</strike> using Windows on our desktops. If all that
mattered was technical superiority, we'd be running BeOS. :)
Ease of use is an important component, when you need to build large
scale-out infrastructure.
Software products end up being building blocks instead of central
nerve pieces, and individually shouldn't need too much attention.
Frankly, the choice of using PHP as the language for
MediaWiki has
probably caused more problems over the years than the choice of
database
backend. :)
:-) Choice of database backend didn't cause lots of problems over last
years, did it?
OTOH, PHP worked quite well in this opensource mediawiki project, I'm
not sure which other language would've got more/better quality
contributions. Erlang maybe? :-))
Domas