To me this is quite boring news. I already felt more distant to MySQL when it got scooped up by Sun and this sense of distance is the same now. Note this distance is still quite "travel-able" .. it just feels a bit like flying to another continent. Also I have essentially zero worries that Oracle will (try) to kill off MySQL or cripple it. MySQL is complementary to their current offerings. One thing I could see however is Oracle pushing for killing off some of the past cruft (and in the process beefing up Oracle compatibility). This last aspect brings me to something I consider much more interesting news.

EnterpriseDB (one of the companies that are active in the PostgreSQL eco-system) have teamed up with IBM to make DB2 more Oracle compatible. Given that IBM is an R&D heavy weight with plenty of developers on hand its quite impressive that EnterpriseDB managed to be part of this effort. After all it seems like quite a big deal to me when one of the heavy weights is suddenly compatible with another one.

At any rate we will see how this all plays out for PHP. Here is hoping that Oracle gets back into the PDO gig now that they have plenty of PHP internals expertise at their fingertips.