"MySQL has a tremendous impact, but it's in a piece of the market where no money changes hands," said John Newton, CTO of Alfresco Software Inc., a maker of open-source content management software.

It's a very different situation from the $11.2 billion in combined Unix server sales that would have come from a . Merger negotiations between IBM and Sun fell apart in recent weeks.

"Regulators look closely at cold hard cash," said Gartner Inc. analyst Kenneth Chin. "Open-source is less on their radar screen."

Also, Oracle's grip on the database market is not as firm as, say, Microsoft's dominance in PC operating systems.

For instance, , actually stole the database crown from Oracle briefly in 2001.