Following a second phase investigation, the European Commission has unconditionally cleared Oracle’s proposed acquisition of US hardware and software vendor Sun Microsystems. The Commission’s investigation focused on the nature and extent of the competitive constraint exerted by the open source database MySQL on Oracle, the leading proprietary database vendor, and whether this would be affected by the proposed transaction. The Commission eventually concluded that the transaction would be unlikely to impede effective competition significantly. RBB advised Oracle throughout the second phase investigation alongside lawyers Clifford Chance.