At ONLamp.com, Daniel H. Steinberg summarizes Adam Bosworth's keynote at the MySQL Users Conference 2005:

"Adam Bosworth suggested that we "do for information what HTTP did for user interface." [...] As a result of a simple, sloppy, standards-based, scalable platform, we have information at our fingertips from Google, Amazon, eBay, and Salesforce. Bosworth's own company, Google, gets hundreds of millions of hard queries a day. He said they see it as putting Ph.Ds in tanks to drive through walls rather than around them.

In addition to the advantages in software, there have been great gains in hardware. Bosworth said that one million dollars buys you five hundred machines with 2TB of in-memory data, a PetaByte of on-disk data, and a reasonable throughput of fifty thousand requests per second. This amounts to one billion requests per day. Having this sort of power changes the way you think."