We finally decided to go with a commercial database over the objections of a number of engineers, including myself. To ease the transition it was decided to convert AdWords over to the new system first, and to do the main ads system later. It was a project on a par with the internationalzation effort in terms of the tedious work required to comb over nearly all of the AdWords code and change all of the database queries. (Databases are supposed to all be compatible with one another, but in reality they pretty much aren’t.)

To make a long story short, it was an unmitigated disaster.

adwords runs on mysql (for the next time someone brings up the old “not for enterprise use”)

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