Shares of database vendor Sybase (SY), which competes with Oracle (ORCL), are up $1.46, or almost 5 percent, today at $33.85, after the company reported sales fell 2 percent from the year-earlier period but still beat analysts’ estimates. Profit was also higher than expected. The company forecast in line with expectations, though the forecast is affected by the negative impact of a higher dollar.

Sybase revenue fell to $278 million from $287.2 million, but beat an average estimate of $273, while profit per share of 56 cents per share, excluding some costs, was ahead of the consensus 52 cents estimates.

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SAP (SAP) and Teradata (TDC) plan to announce Monday a joint effort to make the German company’s software work better with Teradata’s database systems, the latest example of tech companies combining hardware and software.

A growing number of vendors have begun offering servers that come bundled with particular programs, styling the combinations as appliances that are easier to install and manage than components sold separately. Oracle (ORCL) in October announced a joint effort with H-P (HPQ) to offer a “data warehouse” machine that was designed to better search through corporate information better than standalone hardware and software from the two companies.

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As investors and analysts digest this morning’s Oracle-Sun news, some are wondering what will happen to Sun (JAVA)-owned MySQL, and whether combining the Oracle (ORCL) and MySQL database businesses would represent an antitrust concern.

While MySQL would be a small part of Oracle’s overall business, it’s a popular open-source database that competes with other Oracle offerings. The deal, writes Seeking Alpha’s Mike Butcher, “has massive implications for the future openness of Java and MySQL.”

“MySQL is clearly a big prize for Oracle,” writes Om Malik on GigaOm, who says that the acquisition takes out Oracle’s No. 1 threat.

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Five major U.K. carriers are banding together to pool customer data so that it can be put into a giant database and then be used to sell advertising, The Register reports today. How long do you think it will take before this “database” idea lands on American shores? First they charge you hundreds of dollars for calls, then they sell you for pennies.

This is no different than, say, Phorm, NebuAd or any of the other tricks being cooked up by service providers in a desperate attempt to recreate Google’s business model. In the process, they are playing loose and fast with people’s privacy. Jeez, no wonder people hate their phone companies.

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Not long ago, someone invited me out to the Googleplex, the nickname for Google’s (GOOG) headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

The fact is, I already live there. And it’s starting to worry me.

Having grown up in the vapor trail of the ’60s, I learned to be wary of large, centralized organizations, and yet Google, a huge enterprise with a market value of $80 billion, is my ever-present wingman.

My increasingly exclusive relationship with Google started with search, of course, when I switched from Yahoo (YHOO) years ago. Eventually I accepted an invitation to Gmail, with its oodles of storage and very granular search function, and it has oddly become my default database–deep, rich and personal.

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If a false entry in a database leads to a unconstitutional police search that reveals illegal drugs, does the government get to hold it against you?

That’s the question the Supreme Court will tackle on Tuesday in a case civil liberties groups such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center argue will have broad implications in a world where we are constantly being evaluated against databases and watch lists that are riddled with frustratingly persistent errors.

“In these interlinked databases, one error can spread like a disease, infecting every system it touches and condemning the individual to whom this error refers to suffer substantial delay, harassment, and improper arrest,” EPIC director Marc Rotenberg argued in a friend of the court brief.

Not surprisingly, the government disagrees.

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A recent edition of Science featured a worrying paper by University of Chicago sociologist James A. Evans titled “Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship.” Seeking to learn more about how research is conducted online, Evans scoured a database of 34 million articles from science journals. He discovered a paradox: As journals begin publishing online, making it easier for researchers to find and search their contents, research tends to become more superficial.

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