With Sun’s announcement that the company will be bought by Oracle, a very big question comes into mind: What will happen to MySQL?

MySQL is currently under Sun, and soon Oracle, one of its competitors will buy Sun and claim MySQL. What does this forebode with MySQL’s future? Right now, MySQL is a huge threat to Oracle. For one, MySQL is free and open source, while you need to purchase Oracle. And MySQL’s market share cuts off Oracle’s bottom-line.

One scenario is that Oracle can simply drop MySQL support to kill off competition in the low-end market. They could also send MySQL to a slow death where future developments for MySQL are slowed or halted. Another possibility is that MySQL will be transformed into Oracle Lite and better integrate itself with Oracle. This opens up additional revenue from upgrading from MySQL to Oracle. The last outcome is that Oracle fortunately leaves MySQL alone to continue its normal operations, but everything is still uncertain at this point.

But in any case Oracle decides to be business-minded(greedy), expect a fork in the future.