In preparation for the talk I’m giving tomorrow, I was assembling a slide that looks back about 10 years ago and remembering what our database infrastructure was like back then. I was at Yahoo! during that time and our leading-edge MySQL deployments were on machines that just under 1GHz processors running a 32bit operating system, with relatively small, slow, and expensive disks (no SSDs!).

Back then MySQL 3.23 was the norm, though brave folks like us were running MySQL 4.0 beta releases in production to take advantage of the new and improved replication. Remember when simply having replication was a big deal?!

And InnoDB was really, really new–not for the faint of heart.

Oh, how times have changed.

Nowadays, I could probably simulate our old Yahoo! Finance “feeds” infrastructure on my little Thinkpad laptop (8GB RAM, SSD, Core i5 CPU) in a handful of virtual machines.

Those were the good old days.