Totally agree. I don't think anyone would have looked at LAMP 5 years ago and say it's scalable, but Facebook did it, in steps, because they had very talented e

Totally agree. I don't think anyone would have looked at LAMP 5 years ago and say it's scalable, but Facebook did it, in steps, because they had very talented engineers. I found the point of "don't use a relational database" ironic considering they contrasted Friendster and Facebook. Facebook uses MySQL as their backing store. While they might not use it in the traditional way, they most certainly evolved from joins and normalization to their current scheme as a sharded object store as it became critical to their growth.