Sun Microsystems is to ship an open source edition of an IBM database with its Solaris stack to reinforce its credentials as a database distributor.

The recently announced Solaris Enterprise System (SES) will feature open Java DB - Sun's own implementation of the Apache Software Foundation's (ASF's) Derby. ASF Derby (http://db.apache.org/derby/) is the open source version of IBM's Java embedded database, formerly known as Cloudscape, released in 2004.

Sun currently uses open Java DB as an embedded application and developer platform in the portal portion of it Java Enterprise System 4.0.

The announcement follows last month's news that Sun planned to integrate and ship the open source Postgres database with Solaris 10 in the first half of 2006.

At that time, Sun promised this was the first in a series of announcements to establish Solaris as "the premier enterprise database platform." No mention was made then, or now, of support for independent offerings MySQL, the open source database that is currently going down a storm among developers, start-up venture EnterpriseDB, or Computer Associates International spin-out Ingres who claims 5,000 customers. ®

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