Oracle Buys Sun Microsystems For $7.4 Billion

Data­base giant Ora­cle has pur­chased Sun Microsys­tems For $7.4 Bil­lion. A huge deal that sur­prised some peo­ple who thought that IBM would pur­chase Sun, it’s more than just a lot of money chang­ing hands. Sun had pur­chased the open source data­base engine MySQL early last year and now along with Java, Ora­cle owns some of the most widely-used tech­nolo­gies on the web (this weblog uses MySQL as the data­base back­end, as do most Word­Press instal­la­tions). But instead of killing off MySQL, Ora­cle is likely to con­tinue sup­port­ing it as a direct attack on Microsoft’s SQL Server prod­uct in the web arena.

I think it makes sense. Yes, peo­ple choose MySQL because it’s free (as in beer) to use, but it’s also fast and doesn’t take up any­where near the resources that Ora­cle does. The web-based tech­nol­ogy arena is one where Ora­cle has not been a major player — they’re unlikely to increase Ora­cle sales by killing off MySQL (there are other open source data­bases that would ben­e­fit though). Ora­cle has long had its sights on Red­mond, WA. Now it’s going to have even more firepower.

This work, unless oth­er­wise expressly stated, is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.