Inktomi Corporation

So I was there with him at the time.

They were building the Inktomi search engine, which is essentially the predecessor of Google, and trying to build it on clusters, not on a single big box, which is the way previous search engines had been built.

And their first effort at this was to take a transactional database, I believe it was Informix at the time, which was at that time a very good parallel database, and see if they could build a search engine with it.

And all the transactionality guarantees that the database provided were getting in the way of availability.