What database does Google use?

Question

Is it Oracle or MySQL or something they have built themselves?

Answer 1

And it's maybe also handy to know that BigTable is not a relational database (like MySQL) but a huge (distributed) hash table which has very different characteristics. You can play around with (a limited version) of BigTable yourself on the Google AppEngine platform.

Next to Hadoop mentioned above there are many other implementations that try to solve the same problems as BigTable (scalability, availability). I saw a nice blog post yesterday listing most of them here.