Mecworks

Oracle just announced the acquisition of Berkley DB creator Sleepycat Software.

For those of you who are not aware of who Sleepycat is, they are the creators of the Berkley DB found on almost every installation of Linux/UNIX in the world. Despite the popularity of MySQL and PostgreSQL and relative new comer SQLite, Berkley DB is arguably the most relied upon, installed and used OpenSource database in the world. It’s small, fast, light weight, a de facto standard, embeddable and pervasive - it is everywhere.

About Berkley DB from Sleepycat’s web site:

“Berkeley DB is a database engine that provides developers with fast, reliable, local persistence with zero administration. Berkeley DB is a library that links directly into your application. Your application makes simple function calls, rather than sending messages to a remote server, eliminating the performance penalty of client-server architectures. Berkeley DB stores data in application native format, as simple key/value pairs, eliminating the need for translation or mapping. Berkeley DB eliminates the overhead of SQL query processing, enabling applications with predictable access patterns to run faster. Berkeley DB is the ideal choice for static queries over dynamic data, while traditional relational databases are well suited for dynamic queries over static data.”

This move by Oracle is a smart one on their part for sure. They get a tested, robust, widely accepted and enormously popular infrastructure-level piece of software that is more pervasive than their own database implementation. They are immediately in every Linux, UNIX and Apple OS sold and are available or installed on several others. They are in embedded systems and web servers. They are everywhere - instantly.

Whether or not this move will be good for Berkley DB or the other Sleepycat products will will be seen in the near future. My guess is that they want to keep the popularity and pervasiveness of Berkley DB yet at the same time, Big Business is all about the all mighty dollar, especially when that business is publicly owned. Unfortunately this creates a short-sightedness where the short-term monetary returns of the quarter out weigh almost all long term goals and benefits. Businesses typically look at existing customer bases acquired in acquisitions as potential customers that should move to their larger “enterprise” class products. These enterprise products, while certainly feature rich (some might say bloated), are the said businesses’ bread and butter on which they rely to pay employee salaries and benefits. They need to migrate as many cutomers to where they really make the money in order to stay profitable.

In the end, most acquisitions can end up hurting or eliminating smaller acquired products or portions of them. I hope that this will not be the case with Berkley DB and I don’t think Oracle will be short sighted enough to trample on the ever popular database but I fear that Sleepycat’s other products and services may not fair so well.