MySQL founder: rival Oracle not Microsoft

By Tarmo Virki, European technology correspondent

HELSINKI (Reuters) - The main rival to Sun's (JAVA.O) MySQL database has always been Oracle (ORCL.O) not Microsoft (MSFT.O), the creator of MySQL said, as Europe nears an antitrust decision on Oracle's proposed $7 billion purchase of Sun.

European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes told Oracle last month it had failed to diminish worries that the purchase would hurt competition. The European Union has until January 19 to decide whether it will accept the deal.

Oracle wants a quick resolution because it says that Sun, the fourth-biggest maker of computer servers, is losing $100 million a month as rivals like Hewlett-Packard (HPQ.N) and IBM (IBM.N) poach customers amid uncertainty about the closing of the deal.

"The largest and the most common rival was Oracle. In every deal we were competing against Oracle," Michael "Monty" Widenius, the founder of MySQL, told Reuters in an interview.

Oracle and Sun declined to comment.

Widenius, one of the most respected developers of open-source software, left Sun earlier this year to set up his own small database firm Monty Program Ab, which competes head-to-head with MySQL.

Sun bought MySQL for $1 billion just last year and Oracle has said it does not plan to divest MySQL.

The global database market is dominated by technology heavyweights Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.

MySQL has been a rare major newcomer to the industry -- pushing down prices of databases and their maintenance.

Widenius said that when large companies start to use MySQL, they usually use it to replace databases running some 60-80 percent of their applications -- creating price pressure also on the databases used for the remaining applications.

MySQL's value to Oracle is much larger than its turnover as it would remove some of the pricing pressure on its own databases, Widenius said.

MySQL pays for the whole Sun acquisition, he said.

Oracle has said it plans to customize its software with Sun's hardware, selling specialized computers and storage devices that offer better performance than ones using hardware and software from other companies.

OPEN SOURCE WORTH A BILLION

Sun has lately positioned MySQL as a rival to Microsoft, but Widenius said not one of the large clients use MySQL on Windows, it has always had just a few developers working on Windows, and it has a direct, free rival there.