Oracle said on Tuesday that it acquired open source database company Sleepycat Software for an undisclosed sum.
The database giant said Sleepycat's open source Berkeley DB will complement Oracle's existing line of proprietary databases for embedding within applications. The products differ from Oracle's flagship enterprise database software used for general business systems.
The purchase of Sleepycat, which has been rumoured for weeks, gives Oracle another open source product to accompany its proprietary database offerings. At an investor conference last week, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison reiterated the company's strategy to generate revenue from a combination of open source and proprietary software.
"Sleepycat's products enhance Oracle's market-leading database product family by offering enterprise-class support to customers who need to embed a fast, reliable database at a lower cost," Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice-president of Oracle database server technologies, said in a statement.
Unlike Oracle's flagship Oracle 10g database, Sleepycat's Berkeley DB is intended to be embedded within applications. Many of Sleepycat's customers are third-party software companies or value-added resellers, Sleepycat chief executive Michael Olson said on Monday to ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com.
"People use Berkeley DB where they don't need the full power of SQL" relational database systems, Olson said. "In systems or devices, where you have to keep data safe and fast but you can predict its use in advance. Think email servers, or switches and routers."
Sleepycat uses a dual-licence model: It makes a free, open source version of its database available, and it has a commercial license for paying customers.
Sleepycat is the second open source database company Oracle has purchased in the past few months. In October, Oracle purchased a small Finnish company called Innobase, which supplies a storage engine for MySQL.
In response to pressure from low-end databases, Oracle recently released a free version of 10g.
Oracle is also reported to be in talks to buy open source middleware company JBoss and Zend Technologies. None of the companies will comment on the rumours.
