Just when I thought I’d be in for a quiet last day in the office before Christmas… IBM has announced that it is to acquire in-memory database specialist Solid Information Technology in a move that sees it competing directly up against the TimesTen functionality that Oracle acquired in June 2005.

The aqcuisition also has implications for MySQL given Solid’s development of the SolidDB for MySQL engine, an optional replacement for InnoDB (also of course acquired by Oracle).

While MySQL is in the firing line, it does not appear to be the intended target in this instance. MySQL was undoubtedly the target of Oracle’s Innobase acquisition, but at first glance it seems to be a side issue in IBM’s acquisition of Solid. This acquisition appears to be about IBM matching Oracle’s portfolio of 11g Database, TimesTen and Coherence with DB2, solidDB and WebSphere Extended Deployment (XD).

Subscribers to The 451 Group may have recently read how IBM and Solid have been working together to validate the market opportunity for a combination of solidDB’s in-memory database capabilities and IBM’s DB2 database. More information on that proof of concept project is available here (PDF).

As I noted: “Bundling solidDB and DB2 would give both companies a competitive alternative to Oracle’s combination of TimesTen and Oracle Database 11g, and provide Solid with a complement to MySQL Enterprise for solidDB.” The later is the production support package for the solidDB for MySQL engine.

Solid had planned to boost its support for MySQL in the new year following the release of MySQL 5.1. It will be interesting to see if IBM sticks to those plans, but given IBM’s support for multiple databases used against its hardware and software stack, it would not be at all surprising if it does. Let’s not forget that DB2 can also be used as a storage engine for MySQL on System i following the agreement struck between the two companies in April.