I know, I'm pretty worried about this, too. It sucked when MySQL was bought by Sun, now it sucks even more, as it's in Oracle's interest to just kill the project.

Well, there's always Postgre...

There's already open source forks of MySQL. I think that if Oracle/Sun tried to close-source it, the community would gravitate to one of the forks.

A big note, Oracle bought Sun for Java, not MySQL. Worst case, they'd just kill it. But, like I said, Open Source will prevail and I don't think that will happen.

perhaps sqlite is a better option for the future?

This could be the best thing that ever happened to MySQL. Oracle won't be killing Mysql either.

• Mysql makes money. Yes, Oracle makes more, a lot more, but killing a profitable product makes no sense, especially when there are so many other good open source alternatives that people will switch to.
• Mysql now has a parent corp that is a world renown DB expert. I would expect to see substantial improvements in the future.
• Mysql vs Oracle really isn't the battle a lot of people think it is. Does MySql really steal that much business from Oracle? The two can coexist. One for very large scale, high volume architectures, the other for startups and lower volume, high growth potential small or medium size businesses. Mysql's customer's use it because Oracle doesn't fit their business model. Oracle knows they'll just be destroying a huge asset if they try and force businesses to switch to something they cannot afford.

Oracle has acquired a free competitor that gets tens of thousands of downloads per day, all of whom are potential paying customers of Oracle. If they kill development, one of the many forks of MySQL will simply become the preferred codebase and Oracle will have burned millions of dollars in value.