Oracle's Open-Source Shopping Spree – SleepyCat

Looks like at least part of the Oracle shopping spree rumors were based in fact. They have recently announced the acquisition of SleepyCat. That's right – both of MySQL's viable transactional engine are now owned by Oracle. The claim that the two companies don't really compete with each other is now clearly squashed. One has to wonder if these two acquisitions are just a competitive move against MySQL who is starting to encroach on Oracles low end, a reaction to the MySQL/SAP partnership (SAP and Oracle are in quite a CRM battle at the moment and SAP's partnership with MySQL is clearly a move to try to squeeze Oracle out of getting a piece of every SAP install at the DB level), a play to leverage MySQL into an acquisition or a mix of all three. It's possible Oracle is just trying to increase the breadth of their product offerings, but past company history isn't indicative of that. Open Source does offer Oracle some compelling benefits at certain infrastructure levels though, so maybe they are just trying to gain developers and OSS mind share. Interestingly, I got a chance to chat with David (a SleepyCat employee) at SCALE for a solid 30-45 minutes. I learned quite a bit about both the company and their products that I didn't know. They are used in a whole bunch of places from Gmail to Amazon to Cisco routers. Looking through an average Linux distribution, BDB is all over the place. They don't really directly compete with MySQL AB, focusing more on embedded. With the company being private, profitable and widely deployed in addition to being to remaining transactional storage engine you have to wonder – why didn't MySQL AB acquire them before Oracle did? I have no idea at all. After the Innobase acquisition it would have been a natural and logical progression you'd think (although you'd also think MySQL AB would have bought Innobase in the first place). Who knows what the future of BDB and InnoDB are inside Oracle, but the MySQL business division (if they have one) is making me a bit nervous at this point. In what I consider a stand up move, the CEO has posted about the acquisition on the SleepyCat blog.
–jeremy
Oracle, SleepyCat, MySQL, database, CRM, SAP, Open Source, SCALE