Guthrie made the announcement as a blog post on Monday, US time.

He said a preview of the core relational database capabilities of SQL Server would be presented at a Microsoft Data Driven event in New York on Thursday. The event is meant to kick off launch activities for SQL Server

Guthrie wrote: "SQL Server on Linux will provide customers with even more flexibility in their data solution. One with mission-critical performance, industry-leading TCO, best-in-class security, and hybrid cloud innovations — like Stretch Database which lets customers access their data on-premises and in the cloud whenever they want at low cost — all built in."

The blog post quoted Al Gillen, group vice-president of infrastructure at IDC, as saying that this would accelerate the overall adoption of SQL Server.

Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and MariaDB, a fork of MySQL, are the databases commonly used on Linux.

From the blog post, it appears as though Microsoft will be working with both Red Hat and Canonical to implement this initiative. SUSE Linux, the first Linux company to tie up with Microsoft back in 2006 when it signed a patent-licensing deal, appears to have been left out in the cold again.

Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat, was quoted by Guthrie as saying: "SQL Server’s proven enterprise experience and capabilities offer a valuable asset to enterprise Linux customers around the world.

"We believe our customers will welcome this news and are happy to see Microsoft further increasing its investment in Linux. As we build upon our deep hybrid cloud partnership, spanning not only Linux, but also middleware, and PaaS, we’re excited to now extend that collaboration to SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, bringing enterprise customers increased database choice."

Red Hat signed a deal with Microsoft late last year for the deployment of Red Hat solutions on Microsoft's cloud offering, Azure.

Canonical owner Mark Shuttleworth was also quoted in Guthrie's post. "We are delighted to be working with Microsoft as it brings SQL Server to Linux," he said. "Customers are already taking advantage of Azure Data Lake services on Ubuntu, and now developers will be able to build modern applications that utilize SQL Server’s enterprise capabilities."

There was a time when Microsoft would not even consider making its software available for other platforms. Now, it has to do everything it can to work with others, especially Linux, given the extent of enterprise use of what was once considered an outsider. Microsoft's acquisition of Xamarin and its announcement of Microsoft R Server, based on its acquisition of Revolution Analytics, with support for Hadoop and Teradata, are other initiatives towards a similar end.