Overall it might be much better than the deal with IBM. With IBM it was a forgone conclusion that Solaris would have vanished, in case of Oracle there is a fair chance it will survive(look at Weblogic - Oracle is promoting Weblogic as their primary middleware). With this purchase, Oracle is in a position to provide(and own) the whole stack : hardware/os/app container(java)/app/database - look around the only other company which comes close to this is Microsoft(which does not have a big ERP portfolio). I think MySQL was just a small factor in this deal. I think this will be big loss to IBM(now that Oracle gets it). IT customers are gravitating towards utility and end-to-end solutions and applications usually drive push(guess who has the biggest business application portfolio).