What happened (contd)...

But that's not all!
Had A LOT of network problems (devel <--> production)
MySQL apps died
Restrating them was a pain
Used MySQL WAY more than anyone expected
Went from experimental to mission-critical in a couple months
Once others saw it, they jumped on board
Had a lot of server crashes
Isoalated to FreeBSD threading (now fixed in 4.3)
Moved some to Linux for SMP and Threading support
Needed to find a Better Way
Tried writing abstraction libraries
Threw out the first few attempts