[kevinburke]

    MySQL has a huge network of support and we were 
    pretty sure if we had a problem, Google, Yahoo, 
    or Facebook would have to deal with it and patch 
    it before we did. :)

I am fairly certain Google is running its own (patched) version that's fairly different than the off-the-shelf MySQL.

[nl]

You mean using the Google Mysql5patches[1]?

[1] http://code.google.com/p/google-mysql-tools/wiki/Mysql5Patch...

[wizard_2]

And hopefully they're pushing important stuff upstream, it wouldn't make sense to not leverage the community.