but that was, I think, what those who criticized MySQL missed. 95% of the use I saw MySQL being put to in the late 90s and early 00s would today be done in some distributed key/value store. Most people using MySQL didn't care that it wasn't a very good RDBMS because they didn't need a very good RDBMS. they needed a fast key/value store that could handle basic locking most of the time, and that worked out of box without a lot of setup.