It’s been reported a million times elsewhere, but Oracle has acquired Sleepycat, maker of the BerkeleyDB database. This will probably affect various users of BDB itself, but not MySQL users. If Oracle bought Sleepycat to mess with MySQL, they’re smoking something really good. I don’t think they’re that stupid.

I was quoted by Computer World magazine, in their article Users unworried by Oracle’s purchase of Sleepycat as follows:

Despite its popularity elsewhere, BerkeleyDB isn’t widely used by MySQL users, said Jeremy Cole, a former MySQL employee who now helps oversee about 8,000 MySQL databases used worldwide by Yahoo Inc.

“Basically, the BDB storage engine was added to MySQL in the early days as a prototype for adding transactional support to MySQL,” Cole said. “Once BDB was working with MySQL, InnoDB came along shortly afterwards and quickly surpassed BDB in usefulness, speed and features. No one has looked back since.”

Oracle is making some interesting moves. Interesting times ahead…