Learn about Google from Xooglers

I like the "invest in what you know" philosophy of Warren Buffet. That's why I invest largely in tech stocks that I know well. A corollary to that philosophy is "know what you're investing in". One of my favorite stocks is Google (disclosure: I think Blogspot, which hosts this blog, may be owned by Google), and I just found a rich resource for intimate information on Google: Xooglers. Xooglers is a blog set up by and for former Google employees sharing their Google experiences.

From what little I've read so far, the blog entries are balanced and candid. One writer criticizes Google for switching from the open-source MySQL database several years ago, to a commercial database. Apparently, some manager decided they needed a "real" (i.e. expensive) database, and forced the move. This is portrayed as a mistake, by the author of that blog entry. The encouraging news is a reply to this entry that says Google eventually switched back to MySQL.

This blog is useful for more than just it's information about Google. The discussion about the database issue includes a lot of useful information about databases as well, like the importance of "transaction" capabilities in a database, how a small company can crumble under the weight of Websphere and DB2, and how much MySQL has caught up in enterprise database capabilities.