Databases have been written in Java, too; but the combination of performance unpredictability (not something Go has addressed, since it is also garbage-collected) and a bad C compatibility story has proven to limit the reach of these projects.
Your comment seems to imply that java hasn't been successful for db development. HBase, Cassandra and ElasticSearch would all disagree.
Yes, there are situations where GC is not appropriate. But I think those situations aren't as common as they are made out to be.
HBase and ElasticSearch, and even Cassandra can be seen as somewhat niche today. This doesn't mean they aren't doing something of value; and it doesn't mean using the same platform for OLTP and OLAP is the way of the future; but it does mean the competition in their space is more limited and less indicative. There are ground-up rewrites of Cassandra in non-GC'd languages out there, for what it's worth.
Go seems to be, IMO, taking the things Java is best at and trying to make something better. Basically, how would you build Java today if you could do it again?
Take Modula-3 (1986), change the keywords to lowercase and re-brand it as "Cool Language X".
Still better Go than C.