The only explanation that ever made sense to me for that transaction was that it was to make them more attractive to their potential purchasers - MySQL was a very strange acquisition choice for Sun but for Oracle and IBM not so much.
... And then Monty and his team all quit, so what Sun actually got for a billion of their shareholder's dollars was the domain name mysql.com. One of the stupidest business decisions of all time.
Imagine what SUN could have built, if they had $1 billion in cash to spent on a Database. Stupid managers wouldn't let them, but they spent $1 billion on a hyped DB with questionable quality.
I always thought of the MySQL purchase as a last desperate attempt to get their geek mojo back. Not something that they could have done with an in house solution (quickly).
It still didn't work, but I don't think they were just trying to buy a database.
Sure, but investors in this round would _lose_ almost 20% if MongoDB got bought for $1B. Now, if it was EMC, CRM, Red Hat, and Intel making small investments in order to have some influence of the strategic direction of the company, that would make sense. But Sequoia? They must have a case for this making better than market returns over a multi-year window. I am skeptical, but I guess I'll have to revaluate...
