Oracle wins big with its Innobase acquisition | InfoWorld | Column | 2005-10-24 | By Neil McAllister

Oracle wins big with its Innobase acquisition | InfoWorld | Column | 2005-10-24 | By Neil McAllister: "By acquiring Innobase, however, Oracle gains three things. One, it gains accurate accounting of MySQL's market share (because InnoDB ships with every copy). Two, and more importantly, it gains access to the list of MySQL customers who need InnoDB support -- in other words, those specific customers who want the enterprise-class features Oracle has provided for years. And finally, by owning the InnoDB code, Oracle will be in a unique position to develop easy tools to let customers migrate from MySQL to Oracle when the time comes.
So why kill InnoDB or MySQL? I think Oracle has long recognized that what's good for MySQL is good for the relational database market as a whole. Now, in the wake of the Innobase acquisition, MySQL may have become the best sales tool Oracle's database division has. "