Databases have long been part and parcel of web development, but it seems that some of the big 2.0 sites have a few things to say on databases. Some love them, others hate them, and all are dealing with really big databases.

Second Life (database has grown and grown and split), Bloglines and memeorandum.com (lovers of flatfiles), Flickr (almost a Tb of data – and we’re ignoring images here), NASA, Craigslist (dealing with masses of data), O’Reilly (doing interesting data mining / transformation), Google (not much gets said here), Findory and Amazon (Findory try to keep it all in RAM), finally MySQL repsonds saying “Flat files suck”