Finally, an Oracle acquisition!

Perhaps its first in 2007, Oracle announced a “strengthening of position in the embedded database market” with the acquisition of open-source database vendor Sleepycat Software.

Sleepycat’s Berkeley DB is part of open-source products including the Linux operating system, the BSD Unix OS, Apache Web server, OpenLDAP directory and the OpenOffice productivity suite.

With the addition of Sleepycat’s embedded database product portfolio, Oracle seeks to provide “enterprise-class support” together with its Oracle Lite for mobile devices and TimesTen for high-performance in-memory database applications.

First developed in 1991, Berkeley DB is the core version of the Sleepycat embedded database, but the open-source vendor had also begun offering Java and XML versions of its database in recent years. Berkeley DB is complementary to Oracle’s other embedded databases, but differs in having no SQL layer and is able to store data in memory or on disk.

Berkeley DB release 4.5 was released in September 2006, and is touted for the ability for users to upgrade or patch a replicated Berkeley DB without having to take the entire system down, multi-version concurrency controls to handle simultaneous multiple database changes, and a replication framework.

At that time, Oracle representatives reported that Oracle research and development was investigating opportunities to get Berkeley DB to work with the Oracle product portfolio, but offered no concrete results.

Oracle also plans a refresh of Berkeley DB XML shortly.