The Wall Street Journal ran an article today (registration required) on Oracle’s acquisition of Sun and it’s impact on open source, particularly MySQL. From my perspective, the coolest thing about this article is that I’m quoted in the third to last paragraph. Of course, they took a fifteeen minute conversation and boiled it down to the idea that while many people would likely be willing to pay a small fee for MySQL, if the costs get too high they’ll switch to something free.

I’m not as worked up about this as the general open source community seems to be. The trend towards inexpensive, open-source, commodity databases is here to stay. MySQL happens to be the leader right now, but there are several other options out there, including PostgreSQL (and it’s commercial variant, EnterpriseDB), Apache’s Derby, Oracle own open source BerkleyDB embedded database, and a few others.  Each of these fits very different niches, but it’s not an ecosystem of one. If Oracle was to take extreme measures against MySQL now they might be able to delay the commoditization of the database market by a year or two, but no more than that.

But I don’t think they’ll even do that. Oracle didn’t buy Sun for MySQL – they bought it for Java and, possibly, for the hardware business. They could have had MySQL for a lot less a year ago, and they’ve owned an important MySQL component, InnoDB, for several years with no negative impact on MySQL.  Picking up MySQL was just a bonus, and it could open up some interesting opportunities for Oracle. Not so much at the low end of the market, where they already have products, but as MySQL users find themselves needing some of the very high-end features where Oracle leads the market. One example that’s particularly important in healthcare: Oracle supports a feature called “Transparent Data Encryption”, that allows seamless encryption of database tables on disk. It’s an expensive, enterprise-edition add-on, and MySQL doesn’t have anything like it.  As healthcare organizations gear up to meet the new breach disclosure guidelines from FTC and HHS, that’s going to become an attractive feature.

One small correction to the WSJ article is that I’m not “an IT Director at Children’s Hospital, Boston”. I’m the Director of the Informatics Solutions Group at CHB, which is actually quite different – we’re not part of the IT department at all (we came out of the informatics research world).  We’re still substantial users of both Oracle and MySQL, and the CHB IT department has been very helpful over the years as we’ve juggled various bits of infrastructure for different projects.