One Database To Rule The Cloud: Salesforce Debuts Database.com

They seem to have exactly positioned themselves in a spot that will ensure that nobody ever uses them.<p>Cloud databases are what you reluctantly use when you realize that your thing is going to need to scale <i>big</i>. Database.com is prohibitively expensive for anything but tiny datasets and low traffic. Oops.<p>So while it would be great for running your in-house inventory application, there's no compelling reason to migrate off your existing (possibly free) relational database infrastructure.<p>And while it would be be great to be able to handle tons of requests to tons of data at the low latency they quote, you can do that on AWS for 1/1000 the cost.

Database.com is so ugly and unprofessional looking I at first thought it was a spam site and actually had to double check the URL.

I am not sure if an app running on a different cloud platform like (Google App Engine / Azure / etc.,) can make use of Database.com and still provide decent response time to user requests.<p>This service will be helpful for pre-generating reports having queries which span across multiple tables (JOINS) and which can use aggregate queries (SUM/COUNT/MAX/MIN/etc.,.), both of which are currently not possible with Google App Engine's BigTable. But with Google already working on full-featured SQL database support (<a href="http://code.google.com/appengine/business/roadmap.html" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/appengine/business/roadmap.html</a>), I don't think I will use it for such an use-case too.

I've noticed something interesting about this service. They mention that they support row-level security. If they also support anything like stored procedures, you could basically allow your service to contact database.com directly from the side - no hosting- roundtrip.

Wouldn't that slow down an application to have every database call go over the internet?

&#62; "We see cloud databases as a massive market opportunity that will power the shift to real-time enterprise applications that are natively cloud, mobile and social."<p>Wow; that's an <i>impressively</i> high corporate-buzz-word-speak ratio. I guess if we take it literally, though, I guess AT&#38;T and IBM employees have real-time, cloud-based social internal apps to look forward to (IBMVille?).

$10/month/100k records? That is outrageously expensive, even ignoring the transaction costs.

A much better summary of the service than the techcrunch article:<p><a href="http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-News/Salesforce-Announces-Database.com-the-Enterprise-Database-Built-for-the-Cloud-72400.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-News/S...</a><p>The enterprise security compliance can not be understated.<p>This is an extremely powerful service that any of us can sip on cheaply. It probably doesn't fit your use cases, but those saying it is too expensive or offers nothing over other database software or services are missing the point.

If you're curious how SalesForce is pulling this off from an architectural point of view, check this video:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MZZDI18opk" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MZZDI18opk</a><p>It's mostly built on Oracle RAC.

Would it kill them to spend two minutes checking for spelling mistakes / typos?<p>Poor reporting aside, I think this product is... no, I don't know, because the article gave no concrete information at all. Except of course that it's <i>in the cloud!</i>

We just released (as in literally 5 hours ago) a competitor to database.com called ClearDB. Our solution is much simpler than theirs is and is priced much more attractively (starter accounts get 400K calls per month for free). We're actually looking for folks to check it out and give feedback. Would you folks mind having a look around? Check it out - www.cleardb.com.

While having a database online is a cool thing, they need to start offering basic hosting to make this really kick off.<p>Roundtrips will be the major bottleneck, so the solution would be to never leave the server. So, hosting apps like AppEngine is the only way.<p>Or, just offer online databases but with an access-like interface (plenty of potential use cases here) so people store and use the data right there, possibly offering a great reporting tool (like what Crystal used to be eons ago) with a casual REST request for external reports and stuff, but never for external intensive use.

Lot of Salesforce haters here. A couple of counterpoints to reactions:<p>-Remember that Salesforce is targeting large enterprise deals. Sure they want to be developer friendly, but "in the cloud" is overused because there are so many legacy on-premise SAP/Oracle/etc systems.<p>-The costs should not be compared to AWS, but instead to AWS + the cost of a developer headcount. One of Salesforce's goals it seems is to make it so once implemented minor changes to structure and process are able to be done by business users.

For what it's worth, LucidDB ( <a href="http://luciddb.org/" rel="nofollow">http://luciddb.org/</a> ) has a Salesforce foreign data wrapper for it. ( <a href="http://pub.eigenbase.org/wiki/FarragoMedSalesforcePlugin" rel="nofollow">http://pub.eigenbase.org/wiki/FarragoMedSalesforcePlugin</a> ) LucidDB's a column-store standards-focused SQL database, which makes it a lot faster for certain operations (and slower for others, like single row inserts).

My pet peeve with Salesforce is that getting to the data can be difficult especially from other systems.

correct me if i'm wrong, but this is something to use in conjunction with existing cloud applications right? thanks techcrunch for another non-informative article.<p>i imagine this wouldn't be something someone would consider to replace their in-datacenter database solution, going over the WAN to access database data would be awful.<p>i see this more as a service you would consider rolling up if you were already using vmforce to add automatic database capabilities that could scale according to demand.<p>anyone else have thoughts on this?<p>i wonder if they provide any partitioning automatically built in, that would be cool.

I think it is geared more towards mobile apps, which rely on remote db calls anyway.

A number of users mentioned removing middleware from their applications and using this db directly.<p>Out of curiosity, how would one hide the db structure and secure it from malicious users in a javascript app?

I signed up. Figured why not try it out. I really like outsourcing as much as I can (platform as a service like AppEngine and Heroku, datastores like MongoHQ and Cloudant, etc.)

The obvious comparison seems like it would be with Amazon RDS

SQL over a web service...speedy !

.Net, Java, Ruby and PHP but no direct Python support?

300 ms response time doesn't seem so good.

Can this be compared to fathom db? <a href="http://fathomdb.com/about/home" rel="nofollow">http://fathomdb.com/about/home</a><p>Do we have anyone with experience with FDB on hn?