Oh yeah, Oracle acquired another database

[SEE PREVIOUS POST FOR MY INITIAL REACTION.]

In my early morning reaction to Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun, I noted the following:

Perhaps Oracle has acquired a hardware vendor before and I've missed it, but this is still unusual. More importantly than hardware, however, Oracle now owns Java.

However, I forgot one other little aspect of the Oracle-Sun deal. In my FriendFeed comments on the New York Times article from which I originally quoted, Yuvi pointed out something that I had missed:

WAIT. So, Oracle now owns MySQL? haha haha HAHA!

And Tina offered this comment in her own feed:

The best part about Oracle buying Sun? In the future when people taunt me for using Oracle at work saying MySQL is a better product, I'll get the small joy of knowing that we're discussing two apples from the same tree...

Now this portion of the acquisition gets REALLY interesting.

Oracle's usual stance is to support competing technologies, even if they have their own technology in the area. So, for example, even though Oracle sells WebLogic, they support people who use JBOSS. Therefore, HP and Dell don't have to worry that Oracle will suddenly quit supporting their hardware - although I'm sure that Oracle will eventually come up with a low-end total system package that uses Sun rather than HP.

And Oracle does have some other database packages that they already sell, such as the Berkeley DB non-relational database and Oracle Database Lite. But how in the heck are they going to incorporate MySQL into their database offerings?

Oracle actually won't have to answer these questions for some time, since I'm sure that the deal still needs several approvals from government agencies. When I went to read the press release to get an estimate on deal completion, however, I got this statement:

Invalid Request - You are not authorized to login

Poking around at the URL, it turns out that this message appears when the server load is too busy. An embarrassing scalability FAIL for Oracle.

[SEE SUBSEQUENT POST FOR THOUGHTS ON COMMUNITY/IES.]