Oracle buys Sleepycat Sofware

[jamrock]

Oracle said on Tuesday that it acquired open-source database company Sleepycat Software for an undisclosed sum.

The database giant said Sleepycat's open-source Berkeley DB database will complement Oracle's existing line of closed-source databases for embedding within applications. The products differ from Oracle's flagship enterprise database software used for general business systems.

Sleepycat is the developer of the Berkeley DB database software. That is the preferred database backend for OpenLDAP. OpenLDAP has become popular in Linux as a user/password database. Samba, Jabber, qmail, Sendmail and others can be configured to use OpenLDAP for authentication.

Unlike Oracle's flagship Oracle 10g database, Sleepycat's Berkeley DB is intended to be embedded within applications. Many of Sleepycat's customers are third-party software companies or value-added resellers, Sleepycat CEO Michael Olson said Monday in an interview with CNET News.com.

"People use Berkeley DB where they don't need the full power of SQL" relational database systems, Olson said. "In systems or devices, where you have to keep data safe and fast but you can predict its use in advance. Think e-mail servers, or switches and routers."

See the full story here:

http://news.com.com/Oracle+snags+ope...70.html?tag=nl

[jamrock]

Here is some more info.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1926674,00.asp

Apparently Berkeley DB is a major backend for the MySQL database. The acquisition of Sleepycat has some MySQL customers a bit concerned.

MySQL has started work on its on transactional backend to reduce its dependence on Oracle's software.

Indeed, most of the fear around the acquisition comes from those who are using the MySQL database, Schlossnagle said, since Oracle has now bought both companies that provide transactional back ends for the MySQL database: Berkeley and InnoDB.

This one is going to be interesting.