The other day Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi, one of the brighter bulbs on Wall Street, toyed with the idea of Oracle walking away from the Sun deal.

He figures it's unlikely but he wondered if Oracle's conviction level would waver at all on its earnings call Wednesday.

After all Sun's recent pathetic financials - it reported a 31% drop in year-over-year revenue in the June quarter, including a 38% drop in product revenues - are going to make it nigh on to impossible for Oracle to wring its promised $1.5 billion in year-one accretion profits from the acquisition, he said, unless it cuts Sun's workforce by over 50% or 15,000 souls.

So maybe Sun folk should start jumping out of their ground floor offices because Oracle co-president Safra Catz, the company's numbers maven, expressed confidence Wednesday that Oracle could still get $1.5 billion in operating income the first year after the merger closes.

If Sacconaghi's gut hunch is right the clock on that year won't start before January.

He thinks the European Commission is going to be true to form and take until next year to complete its Phase II review of the proposed merger, which means another two God awful quarters of Sun as a standalone company with further erosion in its financials.

Sacconaghi now figures Sun will have a $485 million operating loss in its June 2010 fiscal year on revenues of $9.65 billion, down from $11.27 billion.

By the way back in the spring he thought Oracle would have to can somewhere between 5,500 and 10,000 Sun people depending on the timing.