This article has many facts wrong. It seems that MySQL development halted entirely at Sun. I was concerned about Oracle's motives w.r.t MySQL but I can say they have come out with major new releases that improve MySQL in substantial ways. For instance, they've greatly improved the scalability of InnoDB on large SMP machines. On the other hand, neither Sun nor Oracle have been really wanting to win with MySQL either a…
Was there ever a doubt that MariaDB wouldn't work in demanding applications? It's pretty much MySQL all the way down.
As a corollary, no one wants to be the guy that suggested MongoDB before it caused an outage.