"I'm an open source person. I believe in its development model," she says. "I believe products are better when they're built in open source. That's not Oracle's core business model."

Padir says she thinks customers prefer a heterogeneous data center, rather than one in which a single vendor controls multiple products. But she was reluctant to directly criticize Oracle, and says, "I'm sure they will be a fine steward of MySQL."

Because it took almost a year for Oracle to gain approval for the acquisition of Sun, there was "no road map and uncertainty as to [MySQL's] direction," which temporarily slowed adoption, says Paul Vallee, founder of Pythian, which provides remote database administration services for clients such as IODA. But now that the acquisition has closed, MySQL adoption is strong again, he says.

"Customer willingness to adopt MySQL is back," Vallee says. "Oracle owning it is better than the limbo that was Sun. It's very safe to adopt MySQL now. You have good commercial backing, and Larry [Ellison] made some promises that he would be investing more financial resources into MySQL than Sun was at the time of the acquisition."

Oracle's list of 10 commitments to the MySQL community, published last December, includes increased spending on R&D; continued availability of storage engine APIs and periodic enhancements of MySQL's pluggable storage engine architecture; creation of a customer advisory board and a storage engine vendor advisory board; updates to the MySQL reference manual; a promise to make new versions of MySQL available under the GPL open source license; and a pledge that Oracle will not require customers to purchase support from Oracle in order to obtain a MySQL license.