Did using MySQL allow you to ship a product on-time and under budget? Or, to put this the other way, if you had used The Right Backing Store would you still have delivered the product in a timely manner at the right price-point?
Unclear. I think the right backing store these days would be PostgreSQL. At the time, both were equally easy to get started with. PostgreSQL didn’t have fully serializable transactions yet (IIRC), and I was more familiar with MySQL. OTOH, MySQL has sucked in myriad ways. Replication is very easy to screw up. The query optimizer and SQL advanced feature support is not so good. In general, there have been a lot of rough edges.
