About Sun buying mySQL

Let me start with the coherence (or lack of): last year Sun made available most of their Java technologies as free software under GPL. This year Sun bought mySQL.

Now let's look at the time chosen by Sun to get into the database market - clearly late. In my opinion, databases tend to be commodities, and Microsoft, Oracle and IBM already have them. Databases can be differentiated on another lever - with datawarehouses and data mining.

Which lead us to the final question: what will Sun do with mySQL? Many analysts see Sun's interest on selling software services and hardware over mySQL, guaranteeing better mySQL support under Sun's ecosystems. But I wouldn't be surprised if this was the first item on Sun's wish list, composed mainly on applications supported by mySQL.

InfoQ has summarized other analysis.