Comment by PaulDavisThe1st

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).