Larry wins. IT wins. MySQL wins.

Sharon Machlis astutely asks "What happens to MySQL?" in the Oracle/Sun deal. I think I know.

It thrives.

Larry Ellison and Oracle just snatched away from IBM a handful of powerful business-critical software -- Solaris, Java, and MySQL -- that IT professionals depend on every day. With its already ubiquitous relational database and influential application suite, by adding the three major software technologies from Sun, Oracle is now the unquestioned powerhouse inside the corporate data center.

Forget IBM and Microsoft. Forget Hewlett-Packard. The Sun deal puts Oracle in the vendor catbird seat at the CIO's table. But to keep that seat, Oracle has to continue to push MySQL. Hard.

MySQL, which maybe broke $70 million in sales in 2008, almost a rounding error on the $8+ billion Oracle did in database sales in 2007, can be a fabulous farm team for Oracle's eponymous and pricey databases.

Yes, yes, MySQL is a powerful database in its own right. But it seems that as companies grow and their enterprise IT demands become more sophisticated, companies migrate to more mature databases like Oracle. Finding those companies when they are ready to make the transition is an expensive proposition.

With the Sun deal, finding those customers has become much easier. Oracle has the unbelievable opportunity to control an open source project that will be downloaded around 57 times during the minute or so it takes you to read this blog post. About 50,000 times per day and 12 million downloads per year.

If Oracle builds the best MySQL-to-Oracle migration tools and creates the most efficient MySQL-Oracle services business, all it needs to do each quarter is to migrate a small fraction of their successful, high-growth MySQL customers to Oracle to make the entire Sun acquisition worthwhile. It's expensive to acquire enterprise database customers. MySQL users will come to Oracle for free.

With 400 employees and its current revenues, MySQL is probably not hugely profitable. So, as long as it doesn't lose money, MySQL will become a gold mine for Oracle. Sun has been faulted for fumbling its purchase of MySQL because it did not know what to do with the database. Oracle won't make that same mistake because it knows what it wants from MySQL: Oracle customers.

If Sun had to be acquired, I believe Oracle was the best choice for IT shops because it can leverage the most of Sun's technology portfolio for its existing core business, especially, albeit ironically, MySQL.