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.