Oracle Buys InnoDB

Oracle is on the move again. Recently they purchased both Siebel and PeopleSoft, popular developers of CRM software competing with its own similar package. Now they have purchased a Finnish company that provides the InnoDB engine to the MySQL database, an increasingly popular competitor to Oracle's database system. It should be noted that MySQL has close ties to SAP, yet another developer of CRM software.

It's an interesting and shrewd move by Oracle. For relatively little money they acquire a key component of a competitor's software, giving them a big voice at the table. InnoDB is not the only engine within MySQL, but it is the engine that provides key functionality to its database management. MySQL's main engine provides basic query capability and is geared toward data that does not change often and is therefore optimized for reading. But business applications and larger databases need functions like transaction management, referential integrity, and row-level locking, which InnoDB provides.

What no one knows, of course, is what this move means for the future of MySQL. Oracle has promised to continue providing InnoDB to MySQL, but the terms are not clear. MySQL could simply discontinue its association wth InnoDB and develop the software, being open source, itself. What is clear is that Oracle is becoming quite the beast in the realm of business software.