The giant has licensed capabilities in five-year-old EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Advanced Server, which EnterpriseDB claims will cut by 90 per cent the cost of moving off Oracle. Until now, IBM has used cut-down or free versions of DB2 - DB2 Express and Express-C on Windows and Linux - to woo potential Postgres customers and users of Sun Microsystems' MySQL. The news, or course, comes as Oracle is set to ramp up the database competition on all fronts with its planned purchase of MySQL through the Sun deal. EnterpriseDB's chief executive Ed Boyajian told The Register the joint IBM announcement was not timed to coincide with the Sun/Oracle news, but that the companies have a long-running history of partnership and investment.
Unfortunately, there's likely a lot of truth to the argument, though it's easy to point fingers from the outside and tell others what to do. But this is precisely why Sun should be grateful for Oracle's acquisition of its assets: Oracle needn't appease internal or customer lobbies. Oracle, not having the best possible reputation in the open-source space, will have a hard time keeping the remaining MySQL people in the company or even working on the MySQL project.