> I always got the impression (since I started using it in Prod in the late 90s) that the MySQL team had never worked on an RDBMS before, even as users, and didn't really understand it.
I think some of them might have been involved in miniSQL but it's a long time ago and my memory is hazy now :-)
I was working for an ISP at the time and responsible for a gTLD, my project was called DNSQL, it was as you can imagine a DNS server backed by MySQL so we could edit it with SQL statements rather than manipulating the zonefiles in Perl or sed... Relational constraints and transactions would have made my job a lot easier... A few years later I inherited a 2Tb MyISAM database, which was "fun".
IIRC that's actually correct.