a year and a half ago, as part of its move away from Sun Microsystems Inc., which at that time had just acquired MySQL AB. This time around, fears about the fate of MySQL after Oracle's takeover may have motivated Red Hat to hedge its bets by getting cozy with EnterpriseDB, said Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata Inc.

Despite , some to prevent it from cannibalizing sales of the pricier Oracle Database.

Asay theorized that Red Hat's investment is a counterattack of sorts, pumping up EnterpriseDB as a low-cost challenger to Oracle and other expensive proprietary databases.

Though far less widely used than MySQL, the PostgreSQL that EnterpriseDB relies upon is also generally considered more than MySQL. EnterpriseDB has had some success pulling away Oracle customers, claiming 225 paying customers as of its investment by IBM in March 2008.

Red Hat could also be responding to increased competition from other Linux vendors.