From the ‘wow I didn’t see that one coming‘ files:
After the weeks and weeks of hype surrounding IBM buying Sun, Oracle today announced it was buying Sun — for $7.4 Billion.
With Sun in tow, Oracle will now finally have its own operating system with Solaris, instead of just its own Oracle Enterprise Linux (which is based on Red Hat). Perhaps more importantly, with one swift stroke Oracle has effectively cornered even more of the database market than it already owned.
With MySQL, Oracle will have one of the leading open source databases, and a vendor that has been a bit of a competitor to Oracle over the last several years. It’s a win-win for Oracle. They’ll be able to continue to push their proprietary Oracle database offering, while chewing away at the open source and Web 2.0 sides of the market they didn’t already hold.
Oracle has held a strategic component of the MySQL ecosystem with InnoDB (which it has owned since 2005) for nearly four years. Though MySQL has been talking about an InnoDB killer of its own with Falcon since at least 2006, it hasn’t yet been officially released for mainstream consumption. I think that the fate of Falcon and InnoDB are now clearly going to be very intertwined. Perhaps we’ll now get the full force of the joint Oracle and Sun teams working on MySQL’s transactional database capabilities.
Will Oracle advance MySQL (from a corporate level) further into mission critical workloads where Oracle’s database already exists? Maybe, maybe not. One thing is for sure, Oracle will have one massive database portfolio of both commercial and open source database technology.
What of Java?
