According to Chris, he and his Kernel Framework team “sought to provide a technology platform that would enable eBay to have a richer and more effective personalized experience. The vision was to provide each of the several thousand application servers running the eBay site the ability to access and leverage an instantly updateable, globally shared, personalization data system on every URL request.” As a result, eBay collaborated with MySQL starting back in the Summer of 2007.
In my discussions with Chris and James it was agreed that eBay had been traditionally close-to-the-chest with its technology and application implementation, so getting an award for leveraging the power of open source software was impressive indeed. Chris went on to say, “although not advertised very much, eBay is a technology company at its core, providing internally developed technology solutions for one of the largest scale sites in the world. This particular cache system is built to handle over 4 billion requests per day!”

The transparent initial rollout occurred over the past holiday season.

Chris is presenting an overview of how eBay incorporated MySQL into its personalization platform in a presentation tomorrow at the conference. I will provide a link to the presentation once I receive from Chris.

Congrats to the whole Kernel Framework team on this accomplishment!

The full list of award winners:

2008 MySQL Application of the Year
• FaceBook – Social Network
• Virgin Mobile France – Mobile Operator
• eBay – ECommerce Site

2008 MySQL Partner of the Year
• Zmanda
• Microsoft
• Computacenter

2008 MySQL Community Member of the Year
• Baron Schwartz – Code Contributor
• Diego Medina – Quality Contributor
• Sheeri Kritzer Cabral – Community Advocate

Cheers,
RBH