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Users unworried by Oracle's purchase of Sleepycat

15.02.2006
Users of the open-source MySQL database appeared unworried after the announcement Tuesday of Oracle Corp.'s purchase of Sleepycat Software Inc. BerkeleyDB, the popular embedded open-source database for which Emeryville, Calif.-based Sleepycat provides commercial support, is one of the many choices MySQL users have as the storage engine for their data.

After Oracle's purchase last fall of InnoBase OY Inc., the Finnish maker of InnoDB, another MySQL storage engine, many users fretted that Oracle bought the company simply as a hostile move against MySQL, said John Abbott, an analyst at New York-based consulting firm The 451 Group. The market for large relational databases, for which Oracle and IBM share leadership, has been eroded in recent years as companies gravitate toward lighter-weight, easier-to-use databases such as MySQL.

"It was hard to see why Oracle did it other than to screw up MySQL," Abbott said.

BerkeleyDB is also popular, with Sleepycat claiming that it has been deployed more than 200 million times. It is embedded in several well-known open-source products, including the Linux and BSD Unix operating systems, Apache Web server, OpenLDAP directory and OpenOffice productivity suite.

Despite its popularity elsewhere, BerkeleyDB isn't widely used by MySQL users, said Jeremy Cole, a former MySQL employee who now helps oversee about 8,000 MySQL databases used worldwide by Yahoo Inc.

"Basically, the BDB storage engine was added to MySQL in the early days as a prototype for adding transactional support to MySQL," Cole said. "Once BDB was working with MySQL, InnoDB came along shortly afterwards and quickly surpassed BDB in usefulness, speed and features. No one has looked back since."