"We have seen strong, firm, clear statements from Oracle that GPL will continue," he said. Also, a huge talent pool of MySQL experts remain at Oracle and Oracle has its own database talent, such as Vice President Andy Mendelsohn, Arno said.

But MySQL's once free-speaking ways when it came to upcoming products will end.

"The bigger the company, the more care you need to take to follow things like Sarbanes-Oxley," said Arno. "There are going to be stronger corporate controls about what we can say."

Previous predictions, however, were not all that useful anyway, with forecasts of timeliness going unfulfilled, Arno explained.

MySQL improvement goals include both a stronger emphasis on Windows and boosts related to the LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/PHP/Python) stack, Arno said. "We will see things in this area," he said. Better ease-of-use is a goal as well.