European regulators poop on Oracle’s party

As many expected, the European Commission isn’t smitten with Oracle’s planned buyout of Sun. And the regulars want to take a closer, deeper look at the $7.4 billion deal which already won approval by the much less picky U.S. regulators.

At issue is that owning Sun would put Oracle, the biggest commercial database company on the planet, in charge of MySQL, the leading open-source database in the world and one with distinctly European roots.

This “phase two” inquiry could take four more months with a deadline set for Jan. 19, 2010. That is not good news for Sun hardware partners who are already on tenterhooks about whether there will even be an Oracle hardware business post acquisition.

It may be time for Oracle lawyers to start downplaying the market dominance of Oracle databases and start giving IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server some props, market share wise.

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