According to a survey of over 165 server professionals conducted by the 451 Group, 67% are planning to spend more on databases and data warehousing with Red Hat and 55% are planning to spend less with Oracle in 2012 compared to 2011. Only 6% plan to spend less with Red Hat and only 9% plan to spend more with Oracle.

That’s bad news for Oracle since databases are its bread and butter. And it’s good news not just for Red Hat, but also for companies like EnterpriseDB, which offers enterprise support and services for PostGresSQL (though I’m not sure whether the survey included spending on EnterpriseDB.

The survey results included spending on both Oracle Linux, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Oralce Solaris. Alternatives to Oracle Solaris include Illumos, a continuation of the OpenSolaris project. Joyent’s open source SmartOS is based on Illumos and forms the foundation of the company’s SmartDataCenter offering.

Based in part on these survey results, 451 Group analyst Jay Lyman believes 2012 will be the year of Linux domination. Linux already dominates both the super computing and Web server markets, and Lyman expects more growth in other areas. “The cloud continues to be the biggest disruptor and opportunity for Linux providers,” he writes. “We also expect Linux to continue to be the basis for most offerings in IaaS and particularly PaaS, which is burgeoning across open source languages and frameworks as well as verticals and enterprise customers.” In particular, he notes that Microsoft will soon enable Linux on Azure.

And it’s not just servers and the cloud driving Linux’s adoption, as Lyman points out. Today, as Alex Williams predicted, Canonical announced Ubuntu TV. Whether that will be a success remains to be seen, but don’t forget that Android uses the Linux kernel, as does the soon to be open sourced WebOS, which is starting to see some new life in the health care market.

But with Linux essentially invisible on Android, WebOS and ChromeOS and the fact that desktop Linux has still not caught on with mainstream users, Linux remains mostly a server phenomena. But with the symbiotic relationship between mobile and the cloud, it seems that everyone will be touching Linux more and more, whether we realize it or not.