Sun Microsystems Inc said on Wednesday it will buy open source developer MySQL AB for about $1 billion, allowing it to expand into an estimated $15 billion database market.

Sun also reported preliminary results for its fiscal second quarter, saying it expected higher revenue and profit compared with the year-earlier period.

Sun said it will pay about $800 million in cash in exchange for all of MySQL stock and assume about $200 million in options as part of the deal.

The company said MySQL's open source database is widely used across operating systems, hardware vendors and applications, and are expected to bring new markets for Sun's systems, middleware and other technologies.

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