Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Tedd Ladd, a senior PR manager at Microsoft, posed a self-serving—but interesting nonetheless—thought: “Customers are likely asking themselves if this merger adds more complexity and cost to their environments at time when they are asking for more clarity and value.”

Not so sure that it adds any real complexity and cost to their environments, but Microsoft gets brownie points for moving into FUD mode before IBM did. What it does so, ironically, is to truly deliver FUD—fear, uncertainty and doubt—to the market. And although it’s not likely to have a huge strategic impact on most major chains, the most talked about confusing product is MySQL.

Retailers that use the MySQL open source database probably weren’t too concerned 14 months ago when Sun Microsystems spent $1 billion to buy the company (with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz calling the deal “the most important acquisition in Sun’s history”) because Sun has always been an advocate of open-source software. But this week’s move is a different story.

The news has some MySQL fans in a state of anxiety as they wonder if Oracle will continue to support MySQL or kill it given that MySQL is an open-source alternative, for some applications, to Oracle’s own database. Oracle isn’t revealing its plans. But the issue has created a level of chatter that would give the Tower of Babel a run for its money as pundits and experts try to guess.

“Oracle will kill MySQL,” said IHL Consulting Group President Greg Buzek. He took that stand despite noting that MySQL, which has an install base of about 12 million, doesn’t scale up to the super sizes of Oracle database but it is widely used for “literally anything below a terabyte,” an area where Oracle license fees don’t fit.

Nevertheless, MySQL has been a thorn in the side of Oracle, which was rumored to be interested in buying the company before Sun took the plunge. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Oracle will now stomp it out. In fact, those who believe Oracle will not discontinue support for MySQL suggest the company will keep it alive as a means of competing with similar-sized database products offered by competitors, including Microsoft.

Among those who reportedly believe Oracle will not lay to waste MySQL is Marten Mickos, MySQL’s former CEO. He told Forbes he believes Oracle intends to challenge Microsoft’s fast-growing database business and will use MySQL “to achieve a stronger developer community.” Mickos noted Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is “smart” and, therefore, not likely to kill a product that was getting about 70,000 downloads daily a year ago and is very popular with young developers.

Like other well-known pieces of open source technology, MySQL is being used at almost all of the major retailers, but typically in very minor projects. The very low deployment cost makes it easy for workgroups to use it to customize all kinds of projects. It’s inability to scale, though, has sharply limited its use.

Retail Systems Research Partner Paula Rosenblum said “most significant Web sites tend to use Oracle and Sun as a backend,” but she conceded MySQL is “free, performs very well” and “tends to be embedded in packages so you often don’t know where it is.” Because of that, Rosenblum recommended retailers concerned about the Oracle/Sun deal fallout should “check and see what runtime licenses you have running in your ancillary applications. Someone in your IT department probably knows if they have MySQL in it or not and if it does you might find yourself paying a royalty.”

But lest anyone think that these thoughts have gone unnoticed at Oracle, they announced the purchase of Sun on Monday (April 20). On Tuesday (April 21), Oracle announced an “Internet Seminar” where an E-mail blast said one topic would be one user discussing “how he gained a reliable, scalable, secure, and cost effective platform by moving from MySQL to Oracle.” Coincidental timing? With Oracle, there’s no such thing.