Matt Asay has written an interesting post speculating that Oracle might use the delay caused by the European Commission investigation into its acquisition of Sun to drive the price down. Sounds reasonable enough to me.

In it, Matt makes a couple of statements, one I agree with: “Oracle… likely will prove to be a better manager of this asset than Sun was”; and one that I have real doubts about: “MySQL’s… doing just fine, thank you”.

MySQL might well be doing fine. Unfortunately Sun’s financial results don’t actually provide any evidence either way.

Billings for the MySQL/Infrastructure were up 51% to $313m in FY09, according to information presented with Sun’s financial results, with revenue hitting $100m (up 10%) in Sun’s fourth quarter.

That sounds pretty good, but it is unclear how much of that was attributable to MySQL, and how much to “Infrastructure”. What we do know, based on Sun’s prior financial information, is that whatever Infrastructure is, it delivered revenue of $198m in FY07, the last full year without the contribution of MySQL.

(It was unclear to me at first whether revenue from MySQL had been back-dated into these figures, so I checked with Sun earlier this year – it hadn’t).

Earlier this year Roy Hann speculated that the net contribution to billings by MySQL was roughly $63M during its first four quarters under Sun, “assuming the billings for ‘infrastructure’ didn’t take a massive tumble”.

It is possible that they did, of course. The first quarter (3Q08) that MySQL was added to Sun saw MySQL/Infrastructure revenue plunge 20% YoY to $40m, which would imply that Infrastructure took a nosedive, at least in that quarter. My point is, we just don’t know.

Zack Urlocker recently claimed that MySQL sales inquiries were growing nicely (although I can’t find the original Tweet) but those outside Sun don’t know what from and what to. Mind you, those outside MySQL/Sun never knew what MySQL’s revenue was in the first place.

And we haven’t even mentioned the state of health of he MySQL’s development/sales teams.