News

Oracle-Sun Deal Gets Green Light

The European Commission today cleared Oracle's $7.4 billion agreement to acquire Sun Microsystems, paving the way for the two companies to close the deal.

Oracle is free to combine with Sun without any restrictions, meaning it does not have to spin off MySQL, Sun's open-source database that was the primary subject of the EC's review.

"Although MySQL and Oracle compete in certain parts of the database market, they are not close competitors in others, such as the high-end segment," the EC said in a statement. Even if Oracle were to impede the future of MySQL, there are viable open-source database alternatives, such as PostgreSQL, the EC noted, adding that so-called "forks" in the code-base of MySQL will allow for other open source alternatives.

One such alternative is the Open Database Alliance, launched last year by MySQL founder Monty Widenius. "Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products," EC competition commissioner Neelie Kroes, said in a statement.

Rivals such as IBM, VMware, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, have started preparing for a combined Oracle and Sun as a much larger competitor bringing together their respective hardware and software assets. Many have speculated the Oracle-Sun combination was among several reasons for last week's $250 million agreement between HP and Microsoft to work more closely on developing next-generation data center technology. Also last week, Microsoft began offering a MySQL migration tool for its SQL Server database.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison next Wednesday will outline the merged company's strategy during a five-hour presentation at its Redwood Shores, Calif. headquarters.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Mastering Blazor Authentication and Authorization

    At the Visual Studio Live! @ Microsoft HQ developer conference set for August, Rockford Lhotka will explain the ins and outs of authentication across Blazor Server, WebAssembly, and .NET MAUI Hybrid apps, and show how to use identity and claims to customize application behavior through fine-grained authorization.

  • Linear Support Vector Regression from Scratch Using C# with Evolutionary Training

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the linear support vector regression (linear SVR) technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. A linear SVR model uses an unusual error/loss function and cannot be trained using standard simple techniques, and so evolutionary optimization training is used.

  • Low-Code Report Says AI Will Enhance, Not Replace DIY Dev Tools

    Along with replacing software developers and possibly killing humanity, advanced AI is seen by many as a death knell for the do-it-yourself, low-code/no-code tooling industry, but a new report belies that notion.

  • Vibe Coding with Latest Visual Studio Preview

    Microsoft's latest Visual Studio preview facilitates "vibe coding," where developers mainly use GitHub Copilot AI to do all the programming in accordance with spoken or typed instructions.

  • Steve Sanderson Previews AI App Dev: Small Models, Agents and a Blazor Voice Assistant

    Blazor creator Steve Sanderson presented a keynote at the recent NDC London 2025 conference where he previewed the future of .NET application development with smaller AI models and autonomous agents, along with showcasing a new Blazor voice assistant project demonstrating cutting-edge functionality.

Subscribe on YouTube