Comment by ozgune
4 years ago
> Chris eventually went to Amazon and brought Berkeley DB with him there, so we became one of the first backing stores for Amazon's Dynamo key-value store.
BDB was impressive in that you’d file a bug with them & they would have a patch for you by the next day. If you did the same thing with Oracle, stars would have to align even to get an ack.
I think that’s because they kept BDB pretty simple. I happened to sit in a meeting with Margo Seltzer where the (later distinguished) engineer from Amazon was asking for new features. I think Margo must have said no to every feature request because it didn’t align with their roadmap. I’ve never seen anyone do that. It was impressive to watch.
Then again, Oracle acquired Sleepycat in the end.
This story is rather misleading. BDB was at Amazon long before that.
We used BDB at Amazon way back in the beginning days. It was the first DB the company used, before Oracle and before any in-house systems were written. Shel wrote the code to suck the info we got from Baker & Taylor (basically Books In Print) into a BDB, and that was the Amazon bibliographic database, from day one.
He also knew either Keith or Margot and had a few conversations with them along the way about some performance tweaks that we either wanted or had developed (can't recall which).
I worked tangentially with Chris at Oracle's public cloud offering. His work and train of thought on how to approach systems was always inspiring.
Yes, Chris was pretty cool.
Just to clarify, the engineer in that meeting was Peter Vosshall. I wanted to quote the sentence about Amazon rather than the person.
Also, I was a newbie at the time (probably still am) & I consider myself lucky to be in the meeting. They probably let me in on the meeting because I didn’t mind carrying the pager as much. :)