The month of May has indeed been a truly exciting time for Oracle. From the announced surprise purchase of Sun after IBM dropped out of the running, through to what seems to have been a successful Collaberate ‘09 conference.

I happened to be at Oracle’s UK headquarters in Reading the day after the Sun announcement - absolutely nothing was said about the announcement at all. I think it was still news to most of the employees. Interestingly there has been a lot of speculation about what Oracle is going to do with MySQL. I am amazed by the speculation, MySQL has been a solid strategy that Oracle has been pursuing for years and from my point of view, MySQL is a perfect fit into the Oracle stable of database products. Why do I say that? Oracle acquired InnoDB way back in 2005 and have been using the engine for great things since. So Oracle now has a complete array of database products ranging from the Berkeley DB embedded engine through MySQL, Oracle Personal Edition (PE), Oracle Standard Edition One (SE1), Oracle Standard Edition (SE) and all the way up through Oracle Enterprise Edition (EE) with all the add-ons available (Advanced Security, Oracle Labeled Security, Partitioning Option, RAC, DataVault etc). Not forgetting of course the super quick-deploy version, Oracle Express (XE) and Oracle Times Ten, the in-memory database. All the Oracle Database versions are explained in this PDF, all the options have whitepapers listed on the Oracle DB product page.

What really stood out for me however was a little announcement that almost got lost in all the other news, however it is significant. Effectively, Oracle are extending the usable lifetimes of many of their products at a time when many medium and some large customers will be struggling to break free of the recession. For Oracle Database for example, the support for 10gR2 has been pushed out by one year to July 2010. They have done this by saying that the normally expensive Extended Support will be free for a year, but in these times it is a great gesture to their loyal customers.

For Oracle Database it is also very relevant as 11g still hasn’t achieved EAL4 certification. This certification is required in order for many government departments and related agencies and companies to be able to adopt a product. I asked one of Oracle’s relatively senior UK salesmen about this specifically when I was there, but as usual the answer was ‘Not yet’. There are two reasons for hope however. One is that all three of the previous major releases (8i, 9i and 10g) didn’t achieve certification until the second major release was available (so 8iR2, 9iR2 and 10gR2 were all EAL4 certified). The second reason is that I have been assured that 11gR2 is due this summer, as it is currently undergoing beta testing with some select customers.