European Commission Approves Oracle-Sun Merger

rubycodez writes "The anti-trust body of the EU, the European Commission, has approved Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, believing competition would be preserved. It saw PostgreSQL as a viable independent alternative to MySQL and that market access to Java would not be restricted. Uncertainty about Sun's future has cost over a billion dollars in lost sales in the past year."

Comments

Time to get more familiar with PostgreSQL

[MikeV]

Oracle is sure to kill or marginalize MySQL. Rest in peace my old friend.

Re:Time to get more familiar with PostgreSQL

[argent]

Berkeley DB has zero overlapping market with Oracle DB.

Re:Time to get more familiar with PostgreSQL

[Attila Dimedici]

Oracle is sure to kill or marginalize MySQL. Rest in peace my old friend.

I don't know about that. If I was running Oracle, I would do three things: gradually modify MySQL to make it easier to transition from MySQL to Oracle, market MySQL heavily as a lightweight, easy databse for companies and organizations that can't justify the cost of Oracle for their database needs, develop and market a for pay support structure for MySQL that easily transitions to Oracle if the database gets big and complicated enough to justify the transition (and train the support staff to not transition anybody until they really got significant benefit from the transition.

Re:Time to get more familiar with PostgreSQL

[rhsanborn]

The primary hangup with the EU was the MySQL issue. Oracle didn't hold up 1 Billion dollars in sales with Sun by not giving up MySQL so they could kill MySQL. Releasing or breaking off MySQL would likely have removed all the barriers imposed by the EU and they could have moved along with their lives. They have an interest in MySQL, the question is what.

Re:Time to get more familiar with PostgreSQL

[thetoadwarrior]

Why should Oracle change anything? MySQL is doing well. It'd be better not to rock the boat and just sell loads of support for it rather than scare away people that likely won't ever go for Oracle and kill MySQL.

Re:Time to get more familiar with PostgreSQL

[Richard_at_work]

Because 4GB database size, 1 processor and 1GB ram is more than enough for 99.9% of private websites, blogs, myspace wannabees and stuff hosted on Dreamhost et al. Basically the majority of what MySQL is being used for at the moment.

Re:Time to get more familiar with PostgreSQL

[Antique Geekmeister]

No, it's effectively dead. No one I've worked with in 5 years has started a project with Berkeley DB: every use of it that I've dealt with has been migrated to new systems, usually MySQL. And many of the lightweight uses of it, such as RPM databases and Subversion, have thrown it out with extreme prejudice in favor of SQLite. Oracle bought BerkeleyDB in time to harvest its good ideas and throw it onto the "support it by migrating to something that works better", and simplify the market to their own advantage.

Forget MySQL, What about GlassFish and NetBeans?

[heffel]

GlassFish competes directly with Oracle AS, and Weblogic (which Oracle acquired through BEA's acquisition a while back).

NetBeans competes directly with Oracle's JDeveloper.

I wonder if Oracle will keep these tools around. Personally, I think Oracle would be a fool not to. The NetBeans/GlassFish combo is by far the most productive way to develop server side Java Applications.

Pet Peeve

[Monkeedude1212]

"Uncertainty about Sun's future has cost over a billion dollars in lost sales in the past year." No, you can't say that. Last year could have been a really bad year for Sun regardless, they might have only sold 100 Million dollars worth without all this fiasco going on. Not meeting what the accountants project is not "losing sales" but "missing your target".

Now that the obligatory is out of the way, is this going to be the last I hear about this? Or is someone (name rhymes with Bonty) going to write an angry blog post thats going to get /. front paged? Bound to happen.

Re:Pet Peeve

[eln]

He's already making noise about trying to slow down the approval process in China and Russia. If he wanted to continue to have any control over his baby, he shouldn't have cashed out. Anyone who has the urge to feel sorry for Monty in any of this should remember just how much money he got for selling MySQL in the first place.

$1 Billion out the window, down the tubes, bye-bye

[haruchai]

I know that many MySQL folks are antsy about this, but let's face it, this was the best hope for Solaris & related technologies.
Being swallowed by IBM, I believe, would have led to the swift death of many SUN technologies / divisions. I'm firmly of the opinion
that IBM's major interest was in acquiring and converting SUN's existing enterprise userbase.

Of course, they got a good chunk of that practically for free by the EU's foot-dragging.
I imagine SUN / Oracle have no recourse?

MySQL

[C_Kode]

I doubt Oracle is going to kill or even hamper MySQL. If anything, they will make an Oracle upgrade path that fits like a glove. While MySQL takes away some of Oracle's business, there are things out that that just doesn't need Oracle and companies that just can't afford Oracle DB. It is in Oracle's best interest to empower MySQL so that people don't switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL or other free alternatives. I mean, if I'm Oracle. I want users under my umbrella even if they aren't using my flagship product. If they ever outgrow MySQL, I would (if I were Oracle) want them to look stay with me and upgrade to Oracle DB rather than look else where.

This is a huge boon for PostgreSQL though as several people will migrate away because of this. I used to use PostgreSQL a lot. The only reason I stopped was once InnoDB really stepped up it did what I needed, and MySQL is just easier to use.

Re:MySQL

[rhsanborn]

There are a lot of things that are perfectly suited to MySQL. The problem is when an organization or application grows and suddenly needs redundancy, and all the other fancy, expensive options that Oracle offers. An upgrade path would be brilliant. There is a market for free database software. If Oracle kills MySQL they've done nothing. Everyone can easily switch to Postgres or the branches from MySQL. I suspect that it's in their benefit to let it continue to exist and control the features, and make it upgrade compatible with OracleDB.

Re:Rrrreally

[lepidosteus]

So the guy who wants the merger to happen as fast as possible claims (threaten ?) that slowing it down cost sun a lot of money and will lead to people getting fired ? That's not exactly unbiased ...

Re:$1 Billion out the window, down the tubes, bye-

[QuantumRiff]

I kinda agree.. This puts Oracle right up against HP, and IBM. Both of which have huge consulting, sell hardware, services, and their own databases, as well as selling others if its needed.

Re:MySQL's future

[e4g4]

I have seen Postgres going horribly wrong, so it is not an option for my production environment

Can you clarify? I recently (well, a year ago) switched one of our main web apps from MySQL to Postgres (I needed transactional support on large tables (>100 columns) - which made InnoDB useless), and I've never looked back. How does Postgres go "horribly wrong"?

Re:That would be a nightmare...

[TheRaven64]

Well, not necessarily. MySQL has two parts, the front end and the storage engine. The storage engine is pluggable, and the front end is where all of the weirdness lives. Now that Oracle owns the copyright on MySQL, they are not bound by the GPL when modifying or distributing it, so they can create a MySQL personality for Oracle that will use its native storage (and maybe query optimisation engine in some cases) on the back end. The MySQL client would still think it was talking to a MySQL database, but would really be talking to Oracle via a translation layer.

Re:That would be a nightmare...

[war4peace]

Agreed. it would be the proper way to go. As a matter of fact, this is not the first time this sort of translation is being made available by Oracle.

Re:Forget MySQL, What about GlassFish and NetBeans

[shutdown -p now]

The big deal with NetBeans is that it's an all-in-one package - you get it and JDK, and you're all set to go for any kind of Java development you can possibly think of - be it a desktop Swing application, a J2EE web app, a midlet, or whatever. In that, it's rather similar to Visual Studio.

With Eclipse, you don't even get a decent visual UI editor out of the box. Of course, you can find Eclipse plugins to do everything NetBeans can do, but that's precisely the point - you have to find them first, occasionally you have to pay for the good ones, too, and quite often you have to decide which one out of N options you want to use (just look at the list of available UI editors...). With NetBeans, the choice has been made for you, so you can just use it in blissful ignorance. This is particularly helpful for beginner programmers, since they can just take NetBeans and not worry about anything else.

In short, Eclipse is like Debian, while NetBeans is like SUSE. These are different niches, and both are good to have.