Sun Shines On Oracle

May 2, 2009 – 12:25 by Ryan
oralogo_small sun

Recently, after a failed bid by IBM, Sun announced that they will be selling the company to Oracle for $7.4B. At Deft Labs, we saw the writing on the wall for this deal in January of 2008. This post examines the historical relationship between Oracle and MySQL and looks at the potential impact on the immensely popular open source database.

History

Innobase, the Finnish software company responsible for InnoDB (one of the storage engines available in MySQL) was sold to Oracle in 2005. Oracle made another move against MySQL in 2006 when they purchased Sleepycat, the company responsible for Berkeley DB,  the low-level open source software which Innobase built InnoDB on top of. Oracle also attempted to purchase MySQL in 2006 but then CEO Marten Mickos told reporters, “We will be part of a larger company, but it will be called MySQL.” It is no wonder Mickos turned down the offer. Most open source advocates probably would have seen an Oracle deal as a betrayal. MySQL continued to progress until they sold to the open source-friendly Sun in January of 2008.

Future

We do not forsee any changes in the status quo for the next year or two. After that, we expect to see more of Oracle’s proprietary database technology in MySQL (which will not be available in the open source/developer edition).

Relevance

Several so-called “web scale” databases are beginning to mature. Most of these databases are document-oriented and typically reduce the amount of logic that can be executed in the database/storage layer in favor of more modern techniques which process data in the application layer. A few of the “web scale” databases available are:

In a nutshell, with the migration to a new database paradigm, the loss of MySQL to Oracle will probably not be the worst thing in the world.

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