In the latest blow to Oracle’s market dominance, Google has made the decision to migrate its database environment from MySQL to MariaDB, a community-developed fork that was created in response to Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. Jeremy Cole, a senior systems engineer with the search giant, broke the news at the Extremely Large Databases (XLDB) conference in Stanford, California.

According to Cole, Google is making the switch from MySQL 5.1 to MariaDB 10.0 because the former has become “outdated,” the same reason why the company is seeking alternatives for third party cookies.

A string of privacy scandals in recent years has prompted many web users to install plugins and tools for blocking cookies. To make things worse, mobile devices – which today account for nearly one quarter of global internet traffic – do not offer universal support for the type of cookies used in advertising.

With online ads accounting for over 95 percent of its revenues, Google can’t afford to lose its edge over traditional media. The software titan is reportedly hard at working developing several cookie-less tracking technologies that may not only prove more accurate, but also practically impossible to block. Some speculate that Google is experimenting with a “fingerprint technique” for distinguishing users based on device and browser configurations.

Digesting large volumes of data, whether platform settings or real-time transactions, is complicated enough on its own. This task is only made more difficult by the need to aggregate information from multiple external sources, a challenge that Attunity promises to address with the latest release of its flagship replication solution.

Replicate 3.0 introduces a number of major additions, including a WAN transfer engine that optimizes low-bandwidth and high-distance connections. Other improvements include deeper visibility into database changes and support for HP Vertica and SAP Sybase ASE.