20070530 lets get a real database - plembo/onemoretech GitHub Wiki

title: Let's get a real database link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2007/05/30/lets-get-a-real-database/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 702 created: 2007/05/30 16:11:00 created_gmt: 2007/05/30 16:11:00 comment_status: open post_name: lets-get-a-real-database status: publish post_type: post

Let's get a real database

I just had to share this old post from the Xooglers blog about the evolution of Google’s AdWords application. Here are my favortie snippets:

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. MySQL was quite a capable system, but missing a few (what some would consider basic) features. These missing features were obviously not a show-stopper, as we managed to get AdWords to work without them, but in a few cases it did take some extra programming to work around one of these missing features. On the plus side, MySQL was fast and reliable and, as I have already noted, free.

After AdWords launched, Jane, the ads group manager, decided that now would be a good time to switch over to a “real” database. “Real” is one of those words that Doug ought to add to his list of words. It means “expensive”.

We finally decided to go with a commercial database (I won’t say which one) over the objections of a number of engineers, including myself.

To make a long story short, it was an unmitigated disaster. The new system was slower than molasses in February. Some heroic optimization efforts eventually produced acceptable performance, but it was never as good as the old MySQL-based system had been.

It was still that way when I left Google in October of 2001, but I have heard through the grapevine that they eventually went back to MySQL.

The moral of the story is that sometimes, and in particular with free software, you get more than what you pay for. There are a lot of companies out there paying dearly for commercial databases (and operating systems for that matter). As far as I’m concerned they might as well be flushing that money down the toilet. Actually, they might be better off. We certainly would have been.

Amen.