"I'll pick two for you: Google and Yahoo!. They use MySQL extensively. IMO PostgreSQL can do whatever MySQL can (though, honestly, I'm not sure, I've only ever seen MySQL in high volume environments like Digg, where I'm currently working)."
The thing is... Google and Yahoo also use a lot of Oracle. Otherwise, they wouldn't have all those job openings listed for Oracle DBAs, Oracle developers, and Oracle Applications/Financials people.
Why just a dorm? Some creative engineering students could probably put together some kind of broadcast system to jam the entire network. It could be their finals panic button.
Speaking as an Oracle DBA, there has only been one site that I have gone to work for where I needed to ask what the password for the database was in order to start doing my job--my first job (when I didn't know anything about Oracle). That is one of the first things I check when I start working on databases at a site...passwords and security (that and a few other things that most _decent_ DBAs wouldn't let slide). Unfortunately, there are lots of low-end DBAs out there, but not as many quality DBAs (in some of these people's defense, I have seen situations where one of the IT staff gets handed the DBA baton and told, "Sink or swim, you're the new DBA--have fun!"). Sometimes you also have to remember that system/network/database admins are "invisible folk". If they do their job right, most management (not all mind you--there are some good managers out there) will always wonder what they are paying them for...at least until something goes wrong. When a manager has had a good operations staff working under them and that manager moves on elsewhere to spin up a new IT department, the staffing for administrators can sometimes be neglected--"Those SAs and DBAs didn't really do anything at my last shop, let's just grab someone off the street and train them!". Now if there are these admins out there just trying to "get by", some things like "common security measures" are going to lose priority over things like getting the database up and running, troubleshooting problems that you've not seen before, getting users/developers connected to the database, learning SQL, learning how to create database objects, etc. What may be common to a lot of us, may be the furthest things from their minds at the time...
It depends on how they are using the database...but a lot of the times RAID 5 is not recommended for performance for insert/update/delete heavy applications; however, I would prefer to use it over just striping if money is tight and availability/fault tolerance is a factor. A lot of the current RAID hardware has cache built into them to buffer the writes and help with the performance degradation on RAID 5, but most database systems for the web will saturate that quickly and no longer receive the benefits (and I'm not sure the RAID hardware they chose has the cache to handle the workload the/. users put on the system).:)
They wouldn't even need a permanent Oracle DBA--they could get a consultant (as long as it was a good consultant) to set things up and get it running, train staff on basic procedures and then they could subscribe to a remote DBA service (like what TUSC provides) that has an entire staff of professionals to monitor and maintain your database(s). The only problem I've found with a site switching databases is that if you don't know enough about a database system, you can't get it to perform optimally. They might get Oracle to do some of the extra stuff they need, but the Oracle DBMS is so flexible, that you could easily back yourself up into a performance nightmare (seen it done lots of times). Good Sybase dbas can make their system fly, so can good Oracle dbas, and I'm sure someone who has been working with MySQL for a while can get it to hussle out some content. As for some of the comments about MySQL connecting faster than Oracle--a lot of the Oracle slowdowns that I have seen can be contributed to the fact that Oracle for some time has activated Oracle Trace on its databases by default (they fixed this unnecessary feature in some versions but not all). If you don't disable this, it can have a tremendous impact on your system, and it is a more common than people think (I have fixed the problem on ~20-30 databases just in the past year alone). Just a little extra material for peoples "maps" out there...
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"I'll pick two for you: Google and Yahoo!. They use MySQL extensively. IMO PostgreSQL can do whatever MySQL can (though, honestly, I'm not sure, I've only ever seen MySQL in high volume environments like Digg, where I'm currently working)."
The thing is... Google and Yahoo also use a lot of Oracle. Otherwise, they wouldn't have all those job openings listed for Oracle DBAs, Oracle developers, and Oracle Applications/Financials people.
Why just a dorm? Some creative engineering students could probably put together some kind of broadcast system to jam the entire network. It could be their finals panic button.
Speaking as an Oracle DBA, there has only been one site that I have gone to work for where I needed to ask what the password for the database was in order to start doing my job--my first job (when I didn't know anything about Oracle). That is one of the first things I check when I start working on databases at a site...passwords and security (that and a few other things that most _decent_ DBAs wouldn't let slide). Unfortunately, there are lots of low-end DBAs out there, but not as many quality DBAs (in some of these people's defense, I have seen situations where one of the IT staff gets handed the DBA baton and told, "Sink or swim, you're the new DBA--have fun!"). Sometimes you also have to remember that system/network/database admins are "invisible folk". If they do their job right, most management (not all mind you--there are some good managers out there) will always wonder what they are paying them for...at least until something goes wrong. When a manager has had a good operations staff working under them and that manager moves on elsewhere to spin up a new IT department, the staffing for administrators can sometimes be neglected--"Those SAs and DBAs didn't really do anything at my last shop, let's just grab someone off the street and train them!". Now if there are these admins out there just trying to "get by", some things like "common security measures" are going to lose priority over things like getting the database up and running, troubleshooting problems that you've not seen before, getting users/developers connected to the database, learning SQL, learning how to create database objects, etc. What may be common to a lot of us, may be the furthest things from their minds at the time...
It depends on how they are using the database...but a lot of the times RAID 5 is not recommended for performance for insert/update/delete heavy applications; however, I would prefer to use it over just striping if money is tight and availability/fault tolerance is a factor. A lot of the current RAID hardware has cache built into them to buffer the writes and help with the performance degradation on RAID 5, but most database systems for the web will saturate that quickly and no longer receive the benefits (and I'm not sure the RAID hardware they chose has the cache to handle the workload the /. users put on the system). :)
They wouldn't even need a permanent Oracle DBA--they could get a consultant (as long as it was a good consultant) to set things up and get it running, train staff on basic procedures and then they could subscribe to a remote DBA service (like what TUSC provides) that has an entire staff of professionals to monitor and maintain your database(s). The only problem I've found with a site switching databases is that if you don't know enough about a database system, you can't get it to perform optimally. They might get Oracle to do some of the extra stuff they need, but the Oracle DBMS is so flexible, that you could easily back yourself up into a performance nightmare (seen it done lots of times). Good Sybase dbas can make their system fly, so can good Oracle dbas, and I'm sure someone who has been working with MySQL for a while can get it to hussle out some content.
As for some of the comments about MySQL connecting faster than Oracle--a lot of the Oracle slowdowns that I have seen can be contributed to the fact that Oracle for some time has activated Oracle Trace on its databases by default (they fixed this unnecessary feature in some versions but not all). If you don't disable this, it can have a tremendous impact on your system, and it is a more common than people think (I have fixed the problem on ~20-30 databases just in the past year alone). Just a little extra material for peoples "maps" out there...