By Christopher Norton

Law360, New York (November 10, 2009, 1:49 PM ET) -- The European Commission has issued a statement of objections to the $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. by Oracle Corp. over persistent concerns about the merger's anti-competitive effect on the database technology market, drawing fire from Oracle and U.S. regulators.

The statement, issued Monday, represents the European Union competition regulator's preliminary assessment of the combination of Sun's open source MySQL database product with Oracle's enterprise database products, and its potential negative effects on competition in the market for database products, Sun said in an 8-K...