European regulators have given Oracle the tentative green light in its long-delayed merger with Sun Microsystems now that Oracle has assuaged concerns about the stewardship of the open source MySQL database.

The news first broke in the New York Post, which said Neelie Kroes, the out-going chair of the EU's committee on competition, likes Oracle's promises, and that Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is expected to form an advisory group of MySQL customers.

All that's left, a source familiar with the proceedings told InternetNews.com, is for the commission on competition to write its report from the hearings and submit it to the larger EU regulatory body. So there is still some process left for the two tech firms.

With the holidays rapidly approaching, it's not believed that the report will be finalized until after the new year. The commission has until January 27 but probably won't take that long, said the source.

The good news for Oracle – and however many Sun employees survive the expected purge – comes after a two-day hearing in Brussels where a number of Oracle customers all testified on Oracle's behalf.

Testifying against Oracle were two of its biggest nemeses, SAP and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), along with MySQL creator Michael "Monty" Widenius. He launched an 11th hour appeal to "help 'save' MySQL" from Oracle but that has fallen short.

What swayed the EU was Oracle's proposed ten-point plan for MySQL. In that plan, Oracle promised, among other things, to invest more on research and development for the MySQL Global Business Unit than Sun did in its most recent fiscal year, which was $24 million, and to do so for at least three years.

It promised commitment to future GPL releases, synchronized releases of the Community and Enterprise versions of MySQL and a five year moratorium on legal action against any third party that chooses to implement MySQL's Pluggable Storage Engine (PSE) architecture without distributing code for that implementation under the GPL.

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The latter promise really went over well with the EU and Kroes reaffirmed her statement that she is optimistic that the case will have a satisfactory outcome, while ensuring that the transaction will not have an adverse impact on effective competition in the European database market.

So while the EC is "comfortable with the assertions Oracle made," as the source put it, the deal is still not done until the paperwork is filed.

The Oracle-Sun combo has potential

"I think what we see here is the idea of fighting was a bad one," commented Martin Reynolds, research vice president with Gartner. "This doesn't sound like fighting to me. If we can see this go through, it's about time because it's costing a lot of money."

Gartner just held a datacenter conference with clients, and Reynolds said that clients were actually quite optimistic about the potential for a combined Oracle-Sun.

"They don't expect a monster hardware company with all kinds of crazy systems but they do expect some interesting technology to come out of it," he told InternetNews.com