"Kickfire's hardware-accelerated MySQL appliance blows
the doors off monster Oracle database servers in equivalent TPC-H
benchmarks in a tiny fraction of the cost, space, storage and power
usage. Last week, during their press briefings the future of the
company looked bright indeed. There's only one problem -- Oracle is
about to own MySQL.
"...But with Oracle purchasing Sun along with MySQL, presumably
in order to "buy the books" and Sun's MySQL customer base, it's not
hard to predict how well Kickfire's $35,000 hardware-accelerated
Linux box for will fare with Oracle's sales team when it is
competing with the company’s flagship Oracle
11g DBMS, which starts at $10,000 per licensed CPU, and runs on
Sun's -- soon Oracle's -- SPARC and Opteron-based Solaris
servers."