At last month’s Austin On Rails meeting, somebody mentioned that Oracle bought InnoDB. It was pretty surprising news, and noone was really sure what to make of it. InnoDB has been the recommended transactional storage in engine in MySQL for some time. MySQL 5 had just released and Oracle was out to steal some of that thunder.

MySQL and InnoDB are both open source products, so what does it mean for Oracle to throw its money around in this way?

A recent article over at Database Journal points out some options which Oracle has which could affect MySQL moving forward:

Oracle has a number of options that can seriously affect MySQL. They can charge MySQL a premium for the commercial use of InnoDB, possibly forcing MySQL to drive the price of its commercial version up, reducing its attractiveness to customers. Alternatively, they could release InnoDB under the GPL for all users, leaving MySQL in the unenviable position of having a GPL version of its products that is more fully featured than the commercial version.

This should be interesting.