Oracle Buys Sleepycat Software to Get Berkeley DB

Published: February 23, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As the rumors were suggesting last week, database and application software juggernaut Oracle did indeed acquire Sleepycat Software, a relatively obscure but nonetheless important provider of a commercialized version of the open source Berkeley DB database (which shares a similar ancient code base with Oracle's eponymous database). Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Oracle acquired Sleepycat because of its expertise in providing XML-capable embedded databases, which are becoming increasingly popular as an alternative to generic relational databases like Oracle 10g. Oracle says that it will add Berkeley DB to its embedded product line, which includes a cut-down version of Oracle called Oracle Lite and the TimesTen memory-resident database, which Oracle bought last year. IDC, always happy to be cited for its market size projections, was happy to help Oracle position the Sleepycat deal, explaining that the embedded database market accounted for just over $2 billion in sales in 2005 and was projected to grow to $3.2 billion by 2009. The relatively low cost of open source databases has been putting pricing pressure on Oracle and other database makers, so Oracle was smart to snap up Sleepycat. And with Sleepycat claiming to have over 200 million deployments worldwide, that is a potentially huge installed base of devices from which to take some money.

Berkeley DB is inside lots of software the open source community uses. Can you say "toll road ahead?"