Soon after the employees of Sweden-based MySQL learned that the company was being acquired by Sun Microsystems, they were asked which elements of MySQL’s corporate culture Sun should preserve. Their answers included the usual “diversity,” “collaboration” and “communication.” But one response stood out: "Singing ‘Helan går.’ ”

That bonding exercise set the tone for what has apparently been a smooth process of integrating MySQL’s 400 employees into the 32,000-person Sun work force, while maintaining the progress of work on forthcoming releases of the data management platform.

Now comes the hard work of making MySQL a competitive database management product that large, established businesses would want to buy, a goal that has proved elusive. Startups and Internet companies such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo love MySQL, but old-school financial services and healthcare enterprises with mission-critical systems are reluctant to trust it.

Prior to the acquisition, MySQL embarked on a two-year product road map to add features important to large companies and institutions, such as disk-based clustering, online backup and data auditing, Aslett added. With MySQL operating as part of Sun, those features have become increasingly important.

But because MySQL specialized in Web-based applications and lacked a significant support operation, it still hadn’t made much headway in the traditional enterprise market, added Stephen O’Grady, an analyst at the research firm RedMonk.

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