Oracle, Sun, MySQL: Who Wins and Who Loses
Tuesday, April 21, 200903:21 pm EDT
Oracle came out from behind IBM’s shadow as it were, and made a surprise run at Sun. The move makes a lot of sense for both companies – Oracle has grown far beyond its database roots to business apps and all the way down to operating systems and virtualization. However, Oracle at the core is still a database company by reputation and by revenue, and its acquisition of Sun is creating justifiable trepidation in the MySQL community.
The MySQL community was highly suspicious a few years back when Oracle acquired MySQL’s transaction engine, InnoDB, and even more so now there should be great concern as to what Larry Ellison plans to do with his open source nemesis. Every major database vendor already has its own Express edition to attempt to thwart MySQL, and each of these vendors has little love for these editions because they don’t generate revenue. They are meant primarily as an on-ramp or lock-in to upsell heftier price tag versions of their products up the product line. It will be awhile before we know the outcome, but these are precarious times for organizations relying on MySQL.
Another interesting aspect of this acquisition to watch will be whether Oracle goes all out in the database appliance market. With Sun’s well established hardware presence, I seriously question the future of the recent HP-Oracle Database Machine. However the Sun hardware assets get repurposed, they could become important building blocks for the cloud, which is another win for Oracle since up to this time there has been zero vision from the company in this space. The balancing act for Oracle will be this – How does the company suddenly become a big cloud advocate using Sun’s cloud bits, while at the same time having to deal with the fact that Oracle RAC is ill-suited for cloud deployment due to its shared storage model. Just look at how Amazon provisions on EC2 – cloud computing is really about elastic building blocks that rely on a shared nothing storage model; this way new capacity is added and billed incrementally. Unless Oracle redesigns RAC from the ground up to have a more modular architecture their cloud ambitions will have a significant hole.
In the final analysis the question is whether end users will win out or just Sun’s beleaguered shareholders.
