"Sleepycat’s products enhance Oracle’s marketleading database product family by offering enterprise-class support to customers who need to embed a fast, reliable database at a lower cost," said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president, Oracle Database Server Technologies.

"We’re very excited to join the world’s largest enterprise software company and the industry’s leading database company," said Mike Olson, CEO of Sleepycat Software. "Sleepycat’s products, customer base and proven business model, combined with Oracle’s tremendous expertise, complementary technology and resources, will allow us to better serve the needs of our customers and the open source community."

According to Carl Olofson of IDC’s research, "The embedded database market was projected last year to be just over billion in 2005 and forecasted to grow to over .2 billion by the year 2009. This market is very diverse, and the technologies tend to be quite specialized. Sleepycat’s Berkeley DB complements Oracle TimesTen and Oracle Lite, allowing Oracle to address a broad range of segments within the embedded DBMS market."

Sleepycat Software’s Berkeley DB is the most widely used open source database in the world with deployments estimated at more than 200 million. Berkeley DB is distributed under a dual license model, i.e. available under a public license and also available under a commercial license. Well-known open source projects such as the Linux and BSD UNIX operating systems, Apache web server, OpenLDAP directory, OpenOffice productivity software, and many others embed Berkeley DB technology.