This is great news for Mårten and the team at MySQL.

SAP Ventures is an investor in MySQL. It was always one of my greatest frustrations at SAP that they (as in SAP the company) would complain about sending over $1b of license revenue to Oracle each year but were unwilling to fully commit to supporting MySQL because the guy responsible for certification of MySQL was also leading the MaxDB group and he saw MySQL as a competitor despite the fact that MySQL was, at the time, responsible for sales and support of MaxDB.

Operationally, SAP never supported MySQL to the level they should have and I’m still a little pissed off about that. Perhaps now that Sun is going to be leading the charge they will have more success displacing Oracle in SAP accounts.

This is also a good opportunity to remind everyone that MySQL has a great enterprise database solution and a great company behind it. This acquisition makes perfect sense and fills a big gap in Sun’s software stack, and from a personality standpoint I can see MySQL integrating with Sun rather well.