Jeremy Zawodny has a great post explaining why Oracle’s acquisition of Innobase Oy is a huge issue for MySQL and MySQL customers. Innobase provides the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL. It’s the one that supports foreign keys, transactions, and all that stuff that made MySQL a useful option for real applications. I use MySQL pretty much exclusively these days, but this deal is at least going to prompt me to look a bit closer at PostgreSQL. Fortunately for me, these days I’m using Hibernate and Ruby on Rails for most of my database work, so the specifics of which database I’m using are largely abstracted away.