Where is all the attention that happened for the first two rounds? (I'm really hoping someone will explain why Go's database results are so slow, and what can be done to improve that.)
The most likely cause is in the mysql driver. Go provides an interface for drivers to implement, similar to how JDBC does in Java. One of the go developers, Brad Fitzpatrick, commented [1] that the actual code used by the benchmark looks OK. The discussion of these test results on golang-nuts [1] triggered a number of performance related pull requests [2] to the mysql driver used.
Also of interest: https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=5323
1: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/golang-n...
2: https://github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql/pull/52 https://github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql/pull/55