[General] Sun to buy MySQL for $1 billion

[Burhan Khalid]

I think Sun definately got a better deal than Oracle; who managed to pay 
close to $8 billion for BEA; compared to that, Sun got a giant bargain 
as MySQL definately has more momentum behind it.

Postgres already has a version (EnterpriseDB) which is aimed as a 
drop-in replacement for Oracle and traditionally speaking postgres has 
always had a more complete feature set than MySQL. Some features that 
were introduced in MySQL 4 (and later improved in 5) like stored 
procedures and views were are a staple of pgsql and other mainstream 
databases.

MySQL still lags a bit on proper SQL support and their recent switching 
-- or rather *fixing* their SQL syntax for joins has caused many 
application writers to scramble to release patches to their code (I deal 
with this stuff on a daily basis at my work).

Ever since Oracle released their developer product line (followed by MS 
SQL Express and then IBM with DB2) MySQL has been put more into the 
spotlight as it runs some of the most visible sites on the net 
(Facebook, Google, Nokia).

It will be great to see what comes out of this acquisition :) I hope Sun 
puts their considerable engineering and development muscle into action 
and irons out the remaining issues in MySQL to make it more enterprise 
ready. I wouldn't be surprised if we see dramatic changes to the 
enterprise MySQL version in the next few months as the deal closes.

Regards,
Burhan Khalid

Majed B. wrote:
> You can read more on the acquisition here:
> http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/sun-acquires-mysql.html/
> 
> Seems like a chance for Sun to gain market share in the Small & Medium
> Businesses realm.
> 
> Also to note, from the link above, and from Sun's attitude towards
> Open-Source, lately, it has been very friendly; it released Java under
> the GPL (After a big fight, yes), OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, ...etc.
> Plus, MySQL has an enterprise version, which is enhanced and aims at
> corporations wanting to use MySQL and the support package.
> 
> One thing that I'm thinking of is, Google used to donate code to MySQL
> (http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/24/1528232 and
> http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199201237),
> so I'm wondering whether this will be affected by the acquisition or
> not....
> 
> On Jan 16, 2008 8:44 PM, Bashar Al-Abdulhadi <bashar at kuwaitnet.net> wrote:
>> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080116/ap_on_hi_te/sun_mysql;_ylt=AhRDDpexEPOHYISJ6w7XuYCs0NUE
>>
>>
>> 2008 breaking news for Open Source technologies :)
>>
>>
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> 
> 
> 

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