Imperitives
I cannot understand how anyone cannot see Oracle owning mySQL as anything other than an attempt to control the market. Microsoft would have bought Sun, but it would have been too obvious an attempt to acquire mySQL.
PostgreSQL has better enterprise features than MySQL. This is fine, I am not complaining. Do you really believe that Oracle will let MySQL acquire features that will in any way compete with Oracle DBMS? Since the corps got their hands on mySQL it has hardly advanced at all.
Two things may happen:
1. MySQL remains a slightly stupid little brother of the for-pay Oracle DBMS, and when serious open source based websites need real enterprise DBMS features they cave in, suck the erect penis, and pay for Oracle or MS DBMS products.
2. People on the 'net get over the 'My', 'My', 'My' thing and give up on mySQL and move their support to the mySQL spin offs or to PostgreSQL. I swear that if someone had put forward 'my_MSDOS_batch_file_web_server_script_language' at around the time PHP and Python stated to get mindshare, then we'd be hearing little indeed about PHP and Python today.
For those of you still working with mySQL 3.x and 4.x: joins are supposed to be done by the DBMS not by the scripting language. This is why you want mySQL to advance.