•    Yes, they will
•    No, they won’t
•    That is crazy talk
•    They won’t but they should
•    MySQL will kill itself

…and so on.  To summarize, no one knows for sure at this time but MySQL remains an extremely popular, low-cost option for small-to-medium sized websites that aren’t in high-availability options such as clustering, failover, mirroring, etc.  Yes, some of those capabilities are available for MySQL but they’re nowhere as mature as the options available from Oracle.

Of course, it should be noted that MySQL is not the only open source database available by any means.  Another extremely popular option is the PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org), which touts itself as “The World’s Most Advanced Open Source Database”.  PostgreSQL has supported full stored procedure and trigger capabilities for several years, whereas MySQL added those features in the MySQL 5 release only relatively recently.  While PostgreSQL and MySQL represent the lion’s share of the installed open source DBMS products on medium-to-large scale websites, there are a number of other smaller projects that remain quite popular in lower tier environments, including SQLite (http://www.sqlite.org), Ingres (http://www.ingres.com), and Firebird (http://www.firebirdsql.org).  Before choosing a database to use for your next project, check all of these options out and pick the one that best meets your needs.

On the other hand, what is the relevancy of all this for the average web site or even a well-funded startup site in the process of designing and building their future business?  We’ve seen an increasing trend away from heavyweight, expensive hardware/software solutions in the name of performance and scalability to more nimble, inexpensive hardware/software options whose pieces instead are designed to run well in a clustered environment where individual components can be scaled out as required.  Easily the best example of this type of design is Google itself, whose very success and growth has been based on a design (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform) that relies on inexpensive, off-the-shelf hardware that interoperates inside a large ecosystem of similar machines.  If any one component fails, the entire system keeps running.  While some industry pundits have pointed out that this sets up Oracle to compete solidly with Microsoft, I don’t see it that way.  Instead, it looks to me like this allows Oracle to attempt to compete better against open source solutions which are now considered the de facto choices on most Java and/or Linux/UNIX development efforts.  Oracle does get the popular MySQL database as part of this deal but, because that product is itself open sourced and an active community of developers exists to support and grow it outside Oracle/Sun, thoughts that Oracle will kill it or merge it seem a bit silly…they can support it or not but either way will have little impact on the product, it would seem.

Once the merger has completed and Oracle is able to move forward as one company, I suspect this move – which would have been momentous ten years ago – will have little-to-no impact on web designers and developers building low-to-moderate volume web sites, because those are the very sites today that would never use an Oracle database on Sun hardware in the first place, due to cost, complexity, support, etc.  If you agree or disagree, feel free to leave your comments below!