Is Red Hat making a play for the open source database market? Linux leader Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is investing in open source database vendor EnterpriseDB, the official announcement is set for release on Tuesday October 27th. The official press release does not disclose the exact amount that Red Hat is investing, but it is part of a $19M series C round of funding.

Open source is about a lot more than just Linux, though open source software vendors can learn a lot from the success of Linux. That's where open source database vendor EnterpriseDB is headed with its new CEO Ed Boyajian, who was recruited out of Linux leader Red Hat in June.

South Africa’s nTier has completed a migration of the Water Research Commission’s Compiere ERP system from Oracle to the PostgreSQL-based EnterpriseDB. The commission made the move from the Oracle database to EnterpriseDB because the EnterpriseDB relational database was a more affordable option, nTier said in a statement today.

There were new metrics out this week for both EnterpriseDB's PostgreSQL-centric database business, and Sun Microsystems' MySQL business. These players are at the forefront of challenging pricing for databases and surrounding services from competitors such as Oracle, and both are having strong success with strategies focused on open source databases.

EnterpriseDB plans to announce Tuesday that it is open-sourcing GridSQL, its grid product for data warehousing and business intelligence applications, under the GPLv2 license. GridSQL, and products like it, allow users to scale up database performance by adding more servers to a grid configuration, and then running queries in parallel across the pool.

The sluggish economy is contributing to commercial open source sales, but customers still rank interoperability with proprietary software and vendor viability among their top concerns, according to a new survey from the Open Solutions Alliance.

Ever since Sun anteed up a billion in cold cash for MySQL a couple months back, we wondered when the next shoe would drop. Recently, EnterpriseDB announced that IBM was one of several venture backers to fund its third $10m round of financing.

In Gartner's assessment of the server market in the fourth quarter of 2009, X64 servers and blades in particular were singled out as the growth engines. With IDC's similar, but different, report Thursday we learn that the Windows platform was the real beneficiary of the bump in sales.

French ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor Nexedi made a public bid Monday to take over stewardship of the open-source MySQL database from Sun Microsystems, offering a symbolic €1 in return.