It’s been a long, strange and expensive trip for Oracle in its quest to add Sun Microsystems to its list of company acquisitions. And the final chapter isn’t yet written.

This started in early 2009 when word got out that Sun was up for sale. At the time, IBM was first in line as a buyer, and that scenario nearly happened. The transaction was only a few days from fruition in mid-April when some major issues got in the way and the deal fell through. A few days later, on April 20, Oracle surprised a lot of people by announcing that it would acquire Sun for about $7.4 billion, less Sun’s cash on hand.

Since April 20, it’s been a rocky road for Oracle and for Sun, which is losing a lot of potential sales due to the uncertainty of the situation. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has said he believes Sun is losing about $100 million per month, and that’s a lot of money for anyone — even the billionaire Oracle CEO.

The major sticking point is an open-source database that Sun bought for $1 billion two years ago: MySQL. The EC is withholding its blessing on the deal until it is satisfied that MySQL will be allowed to innovate and compete fairly in the IT marketplace. The fact that Oracle’s own proprietary database often competes directly against it is seen as a huge conflict of interest; obviously, this has been the crux of the problem. Ellison has said that MySQL does not compete with his company’s bread-and-butter databases. This eWEEK slide show covers the 15 most important plot points in this lingering international IT saga, with the final chapter still to be written.

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