Ellison: No MySQL spin off

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, has made it clear that he is not prepared to spin off Sun's MySQL business in an attempt to placate the European Commission investigation of competition issues with Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun. The deal has already been approved by US authorities and Ellison thinks that the European Commission will follow saying "I think once they do their job, they're going to come to the same conclusion".

The Oracle CEO says there is no actual competition between Oracle and MySQL pointing out that they "are both called databases; they address different markets". According to a report in InfoWorld, Ellison wanted the deal to close as soon as possible as "Sun is losing $100 million a month" and he described the workstation, server and software company as a "national treasure". Talking about operating systems, Ellison said that Oracle was still a big supporter of Linux. But, he added, Solaris is the more mature operating system.

Ellison's comments were made during an interview with Ed Zander, former Sun and Motorola executive, at a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley. Other topics of discussion included flash storage, which Ellison believes allows for vast acceleration in databases, and Microsoft, who he called a "very consumer-centric company" that expends all of its energies in that consumer business.

(djwm)