HP seems to be courting Oracle, its one time bitter foe, by choosing Oracle's MySQL (it's not Oracle's original stuff but was part of Sun Microsystems suite which it acquired in 2010) over SQL Server. This reminds me of the famous quote (I forgot to who it must be attributed) that, "there are no friends, no enemies, but eternal interests".

Why did HP do it? Perhaps MySQL’s adoration by the Open Source developers (it's really poor man's RDBMS compared to MS SQL Server's and may cost a lot less than SQL Server) and by those with smaller budgets. Perhaps, HP wants to motivate the investors to make bets  (see chart below), or perhaps there are more small scale players using Amazon Cloud with MySQL as their backend choice testifying to its popularity with small scale implementations which really do not care for bells and whistles that SQL Servers offers, or perhaps Oracle, Amazon, HP ganging up to beat up Microsoft. In any case, one cannot be sure of one's friends or one's enemies.

However, SQL Server which has a totally integrated BI suite, awesome synchronization capability spanning oceans, and with its excellent security features will not be abandoned by big time players. May be we should revisit the below chart in a year's time.