While it’s no longer news that Oracle shelled out $5.6 billion for Sun Microsystems many open source lovers have to be at least wondering what will happen to the most widely used free database server. With nearly 44% of software developers choosing Mysql as database of choice many are betting on the fact that MySql will remain free. In the unlikely scenario that Oracle starts charging for Mysql there are several forks that can be used.

Drizzle is a fork of MySQL 6.0 that is designed for massive concurrency on modern multi-cpu/core architecture

MariaDB – The intent of this branch is to keep up with MySQL development, maintain user compatibility, but with more features.