Oracle bought 10-year-old Finland-based Innobase OY, a developer of discrete transactional database technology called InnoDB that's distributed as part of the MySQL database. As Oracle pointed out, it's not a standalone product. MySQL, which competes  against Oracle, uses InnoDB as a storage engine and is dependent on it. Apparently MySQL developers use it for high concurrency, row-level locking and transactions.

Oracle said InnoDB's contract with MySQL comes up for renewal next year and that Oracle fully expects to negotiate an extension. Theoretically MySQL could fork the InnoDB code, but in its formal acknowledgement of the Oracle acquisition, MySQL noted that "InnoDB is released under the GPL" and that "With this license, our users have complete freedom to use, develop. Modify the code base as they wish."

It also said people could close from a number of other storage engines including MyISAM, Memory, Merge and Cluster and that MySQL 5.0 includes the new Archive and Federated storage engines.

Oracle, meanwhile, said it intends to continue developing the InnoDB technology and expand its commitment to open source software. Oracle has already contributed an open source clustered file system to Linux.

Oracle said InnoDB was distributed under the GPL but has not pointed out that InnoDB's Hot Backup Tool is not; this is needed  to back up InnoDB tables without shutting down MySQL or at least locking out all transactions, according to a blog called Gadgetopia.

(This is a significantly abridged version of a story that first appeared at www.clientservernews.com.)