Oracle's acquisition of MySQL is causing MySQL developers and practitioners to worry as they expect the project to stop just like everyone had expected after the previous acquisitions of Oracle. 

Looking back at the previous acquisitions of the company it can be easily remembered that when Oracle had acquired Innobase the company that makes the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL in October of 2005, there were similar worries that it was the end for MySQL in enterprise applications. However, Oracle continued to support and develop InnoDB. 

What is more, the company managed to keep InnoDB's dual-licensing structure.Another purchase of Oracle was Sleepycat, which produces BerkeleyDB, the de facto standard for embedded databases Software, in 2006. BerkeleyDB was also distributed under the same dual license. Oracle still continues to enhance and support BerkeleyDB, but uses it as a starting point to up-sell customers on its TimesTen embedded database and Oracle 11g. 

Company’s next stab at open source was Unbreakable Linux, which is a distribution that's 100 per cent binary compatible with Red Hat. However, the name of the source, Unbreakable, is more of a marketing campaign around a Linux support program. Now with the purchase of MySQL, it would logically follow that Oracle tends to continue to develop and support the source and use it to push its proprietary databases on larger customers. 

However, it is expected that Oracle will not completely stop MySQL, as it is in Oracle's best interest to keep MySQL moving at a glacial pace. There are many reasons why specialists state MySQL is an outdated source today, including its biggest technical weakness - scalability. Web engineers who face this issue can now be offered Oracle’s database and Sun hardware that will fix the problem. 

However, it is natural that soon the market will start offering a new solution to MySQL’s scalability problem, such Drizzle project, run by MySQL's director of architecture, which is not complete yet.