I wrote php2 + msql before starting in that company (and a bit of php3). Like in your case it was essentially static site generator but the management part was HTA (application hosted in internet explorer. you could write one using whatever activex/language: vbscript, python, perl).

as backend we had oracle. at first we tried oracle/linux (just released). but we never managed make it work (oracle engineers that came to us failed as well). So we got dedicated sun server for it.

One day I was bored, installed mysql on my workstation, made a changes in couple of queries and all of sudden i got x20 performance of sun box with oracle. Lead developer said that it's bad solution as mysql doesn't properly supports referential integrity (we didn't actually used it in oracle iirc)