Excerpts from that interview follow:
What will change for BerkeleyDB customers under Oracle? The biggest change is the fact that Sleepycat had 25 employees and Oracle has 56,000. Customer support used to be provided by the engineering team backed up a very small support team. About half the cases would get handled by support, with the other half sent back to engineers. We expect that model to continue. But now we have a team around the globe that can take cases in local languages and time zones. Round-the-clock coverage is easier and less expensive now.
Developers will continue to interact with customers. That's one thing Larry [Ellison] specifically said he liked about open-source -- the easy communication between the consumers and developers of software. We hope and expect there will be no negative changes.
Customers often chose BerkeleyDB specifically because they didn't want to have to deal with a full-blown SQL database. Does your role now feel weird? Not at all. If you need the full power and flexibility of SQL, I used to have to turn you away. Oracle used to have a much harder time answering nonrelational requirements. If you don't need SQL or ad hoc query, but just want a lightweight embeddable engine, BerkeleyDB gives users that. It's not the case that there's no overlap among these products, but their target is different customers.
What is the feature road map for BerkeleyDB and the other products you oversee? In general, we're concentrating on continuing to serve our existing niches and customers. One notable change is that because we're now part of a much larger organization, we want all the products, including TimesTen and BerkeleyDB, to interoperate with others in the Oracle lineup, to behave predictably if you're an Oracle DBA.
I can't talk about any particular features now. We're about to release Version 4.5 of the BerkeleyDB core engine, which was already specced out. We are staying customer-focused. But what our much larger customer base wants now is more interoperation among the products. So that's driving our thinking in ways that you'd expect.
With just 25 employees, is Sleepycat helping to bring open-source values to Oracle? I've been in the database industry since 1986. I'm well aware of the sometimes fairly negative reputation that Oracle has, of being a fearsome competitor. My experience inside the company so far has been fairly good. There are a lot of innovative, hardworking people. And I have seen such people assume leadership roles and drive the company forward, irrespective of their actual titles. Oracle is a company where the individual contribution matters. Moreover, there is a legacy of open-source involvement at Oracle and by its employees. We have just done a pretty bad job of talking about it.
Will Oracle buy more open-source companies? Yes. There is a team at Oracle focused on acquisitions. They've done 24 in the last 18 months. I don't think it would be PostGres or MySQL. It would be unbelievably hard to buy PostGres because of its license terms. MySQL's CEO Marten Mickos has said on the record that he wants MySQL to stay independent.