"Mongo uses (auto) sharding as our path to scalabity (sharding is in alpha)"
it's my understanding that mongo currently only shards primary key lookups, not queries. it'll be interesting to see how successful they are in grafting a full distributed layer over top of it. generally the merge layer kills you because you must query all nodes to support global indexes. that is not to say that its impossible.
mongo has some wacky stuff in the on-disk file format which is kind of interesting, too.
i never had a problem getting stand-alone dsl...the phone numbers are secret because local carriers never really integrated into Bell Mobility, and Bell Mobility never really integrated into ATT...they are basically separate companies all named ATT to confuse you.
For what its worth, Facebook does have a big Oracle install.
I find it strange that everyone trotted out their preformed opinion for this piece, but no one comments on the cassandra article which actually proposes a solution...although it requires you to learn something, how horrible.