Over the years, the database world has been buzzing with the strategic threat posed to the established players by upstart open-source database systems. Oracle and IBM would no longer be able to gouge defenseless small and medium-sized businesses of non-trivial portions of their IT budgets for a mere database licence. Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, for their part, have tried their best to respond to this threat, but it is clear that they cannot simply squash open-source products, but rather evolve with the changing landscape.
the countered threat from Oracle
Oracle made some strategic purchases in the past few years to establish a foothold in the embedded and front-end database market by acquiring Sleepycat (maintainers of BerkeleyDB) and InnoBase (makers of InnoDB storage engine for MySQL). These two also happened to provide the only two transactional backends for MySQL, whlie InnoDB is the only one to be used widely in practice. …
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