The people of MySQL AB seem to be very happy with the take-over. I can imagine that. It will give for sure some financial ease of mind for the company and his employees and access to a large source of knowledge and resources. Somehow many people, including myself, have a suspicion against “the big corporations”. With the exception of Apple computers ofc :).
Don’t forget however that Sun has a decent and reliable history with Open Source. Open Office and making Java open source to name 2 big achievements of Sun.
I use MySQL now for close to 9 years. I have learned to love this database engine, discovering the more advanced features of SQL step by step. I only have used MySQL directly or interfaced by PHP.
I can only express my hope that Sun will support the continuous development of the MySQL API as used by the MySQLi or mysqlnd extensions of PHP.
Some analysts suspect that Sun is busy to build his “own” alternative to the classic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. The Sun-Stack would be SAMJ (Solaris (opensourced!), Apache, MySQL, Java).
People should have the freedom to use and code the language they prefer.
I really hope it won’t be soon that if you want to have the full support for the capabilities of MySQL, you have to use a Java interface to interact with the database engine from a web-environment.