Sun + Oracle: The Hidden bullet

There's quite a bit of buzz today in the financial world about the Sun/Oracle merger (http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&ned=us&ncl=1337597858&topic=b)

Okay, let's be honest, it isn't a merger, Oracle is buying/swallowing/consuming Sun in an attempt to look/feel/act like IBM. Most of the analysis focuses on the financial impact, the pro's and con's (or absence) of the value of the shares, the potential earnings impacts, etc. The growing consensus looks to circling just this side of a collective yawn. Call it a variation of "Yahoo-merger" fatigue, I honestly think the finance folks are just tired of talking about technology mergers that aren't going to jump start the economy or get the market indices out of the basement.

From a technological perspective, however, this is a watershed event, a very subtle bullet has been fired as part of the folderol and even experts inside the industry have to squint to see the impact, the full impact may very well never be known. Like Oracle, Sun went on a buying spree a few years ago, back when it seemed like everything was at bottom-dollar prices. (Less tech-focused trader saw GM at $10 and thought it a steal, alas.) One of Sun's after-dinner mints was a curious absorption of a database entity known more for being open-source and handy to techies than anything else.

MySQL touts itself as "The World's Most Popular Open Source Database" which, like most marketing, doesn't really say much about the real strength (or lack thereof) of what lies beneath. In this case, it is modest at best. MySQL is an incredibly useful, growing relational database which, for a growing number of small-end businesses (and some not so small), makes for a viable alternative to bigger price tag database systems, such as, say, Oracle.

Within the Linux community, for example, there is a well known acronym "LAMP" which is referred to as the basis for many, many very powerful systems (such as the content management system known as Drupal, upon which this and several much-larger websites are based.) LAMP stands for Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP (depending on your software religion, the P may refer to Python, Perl, etc. For the non-tech savvy, equate this to Protestant vs. Presbyterian, it all falls under the same rubric of "the Programming Language of your choice.") The "LAMP" platform has proven to be a very stable, very open and thus very powerful common development platform upon which many packages, systems and applications have been developed, deployed and demonstrated as robust, viable and ready to compete in the small- (and not-so-small-) business world. It is also worth nothing that, of late, a new acronym of "WAMP" has been gaining IT eye- and brain-space market share: Windows+Apache+Mysql+ProgrammingLanguageOfChoice.

The role of MySQL in each of these platforms, the ability to provide a common basis and powerful tool set for the manipulation of substantial data across a variety of contexts and purposes is an incredibly useful, powerful and cost effective combination. Unsure? Replace "MySQL" with "Java" in the previous sentence and see if you don't hear the Sun marketing department lobbying to change their stock name to JAVA a few years ago. Java provides innovative, independent, multi-platform portable capability to a variety of heterogeneously sized businesses, applications and needs. Now put "MySQL" back in place of "JAVA" -- yep, it still works.

So, Oracle's capture of Sun silently puts the pretender to the throne in the same house as the self-appointed King of Databases, long before Oracle is ready to yield any more marketshare, be it to SAP, IBM or any other TLA, much less a five-lettered world like MySQL. The challenger has been conquered before it truly had a chance to emerge onto the battlefield. As much as I would love to make puns on Oracle's foresight into the future threat of MySQL, I just don't have the literary bones to make it work. Instead, I'll stick to the mundane world and point out that there really isn't a foundation for a monopoly question for the DOJ here because, well, the eggs just didn't have time to hatch.

Ironically, the same <strike>depressed</strike> distressed economic conditions which make this merger so palatable are the very ones that would have made MySQL so very valuable. MySQL is the poor man's database and, with every day, there are more poor men and women running equally poor (shrinking?) small businesses.

The merger of Sun and Oracle is bad news for them.