> From what I read, Google's first AdWords server in 2000 was built on MySQL. MySQL was released in 1995 so using a relatively new 5-year old technology may have been more risky than picking traditional Oracle RDBMS which had been around since the late 1970s.
well they could've also used postgres/ingress. but at the time it was way less used than mysql and way more conservative. mysql was probably used because in the 2000's mysql was already a huge community. way bigger than most shiny graph databases.
i remember mysql being all the rage when it came out because it was "fast". I don't remember what it was compared to but the reputation was a fast database. I remember the postgres crowd bemoaning mysql's lack of ACID compliance (this was even before innodb came out) and the response was "yeah but it's fast".
iirc, MySQL already had built-in replication support around that time. This alone may have been a deciding factor. Postgres didn't provide built-in replication until a decade later.
well they could've also used postgres/ingress. but at the time it was way less used than mysql and way more conservative. mysql was probably used because in the 2000's mysql was already a huge community. way bigger than most shiny graph databases.