Oracle Buys Sleepycat

Oracle on Tuesday said it has acquired Sleepycat Software, an Emeryville, Calif., open-source database vendor.

Reports have swirled for weeks that Oracle was poised to buy JBoss, Zend and Sleepycat as early as this week. The Zend deal is apparently off the table, and JBoss CEO Marc Fleury has been dodging questions about the rumored Oracle buyout.

Terms of the Sleepycat deal weren't disclosed. The acquisition adds Sleepycat's Berkeley DB to Oracle TimesTen and Oracle Database Lite in terms of embedded databases, according to Oracle.

"Sleepycat's products enhance Oracle's market-leading 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 of Oracle Database Server Technologies, in a statement.

Berkeley DB is a popular open-source database, with Sleepycat claiming approximately 200 million deployments. Like MySQL, another leading database, Berkeley DB can be bought via commercial or public license.

It's uncertain if deals for Zend or JBoss are still in the works, but Oracle clearly is still seeking acquisitions. The Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company just closed its multibillion-dollar deal to purchase Siebel Systems several weeks ago, and last year the database kingpin bought PeopleSoft, Oblix, Thor Technologies, OctetString, Retek and TimesTen.