Sun acquires MySQL

Wow, Sun is acquiring MySQL. That’s sort of stunning.

My first impression is that MySQL has been under a bit of pressure in that big companies like IBM and Oracle have been buying up the companies who provide their transactional storage engines. Now MySQL has the (perhaps diminishing) clout of Sun behind them. Oh, and suddenly Sun goes from relatively irrelevant in the Web development market to incredibly relevant.

And yes, I know that Sun provides Java, but the JDK is only one small piece of the overall Java Web application platform. The language is the language, but what affects developers most is the IDE, deployment platform, application server, and the libraries and frameworks that they use, and many Java developers don’t depend on Sun for any of that stuff.

I am a heavy user of MySQL, so I hope that this turns out well.

Update: Blog reactions from all over. Check out Simon Phipps, Jonathan Schwartz, and Jeremy Cole.