Oracle Buys Sleepycat

It turns out that one-third of the rumor surrounding Oracle buying a trio of
open source companies was true.

Oracle today announced that it will acquire open source database
vendor Sleepycat. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition adds Sleepycat’s line of open source Berkeley DB databases
to Oracle’s embedded database product line. Sleepycat develops three versions of
Berkeley DB: Berkeley DB, Java Edition and XML.

Sleepycat just recently updated its Berkeley DB Java Edition to version
2.1, which is an incremental upgrade over version 2.0.

Like MySQL, Berkeley DB is licensed under a dual-license model that includes
both public and commercial licenses.

In a release, Oracle claims that Berkeley DB, “is the most widely used open
source database in the world with deployments estimated at more than 200
million.”

“Sleepycat’s products enhance Oracle’s market-leading database product
family by offering enterprise-class support to customers who need to embed a
fast, reliable database at a lower cost,” said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior
vice president of Oracle Database Server Technologies, in a statement.

The Oracle acquisition comes after much speculation that Larry Ellison was
on the hunt for open source companies. The original speculation had
Sleepycat, JBoss and PHP’s patron Zend all on the table.

The acquisition of Sleepycat is the second key open source database
component company bought by Oracle in fewer than four months.

In October,
Oracle acquired Finnish database vendor Innobase and its discrete
transactional database technology, InnoDB. InnoDB is a critical part of open
source databases, such as MySQL.