Hey people, There's been quite a bit of speculation about MySQL's future, upon the announcement of Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. There're a number of things that will work in MySQL's favour. First of all, you have to remember that MySQL is released under the GPL license (although the documentation isn't "free"). Also, there's a lot of development on MySQL that's going on outside MySQL/Sun/Oracle. And also, there's been an exodus of the original developers and management from MySQL, for some time now. Going forward, there's likely to be increased interest and activity in some of the interesting projects drawn from MySQL, including third-party patches, builds, and "forks". A few include Drizzle (online at < http://drizzle.org/wiki/About_Drizzle> and <https://launchpad.net/drizzle>); OurDelta (online at <http://ourdelta.org/>); Monty Program Ab's MariaDB (online at <https://launchpad.net/maria> and < http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB>) and their Maria storage engine (online at <http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/Maria>); and Percona and their XtraDB storage engine (online at < http://www.percona.com/percona-lab.html> and < https://launchpad.net/percona-xtradb>). Things are definitely changing, but I guess how Oracle handles MySQL and the wider community will determine how fast it all happens. To keep up with the changes, check out these blogs: < http://planet.mysql.com/>, <http://monty-says.blogspot.com/>, < http://marksitblog.blogspot.com/>, <http://krow.livejournal.com/>, < http://jcole.us/blog/>, <http://mysqlha.blogspot.com/>, < http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/>, <http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/>, and < http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/12/23/great-things-afoot-in-the-mysql-comm...
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Joseph.