##CONTINUE##
The first, was an announcement to the crowd at "Whose Cloud is It Anyway?", a "roundtable and meetup" sponsored by TechCrunch, held Friday on Microsoft's Mountain View, CA campus.
(Charles Cooper has more on the "roundtable" portion of the program on his blog. My favorite part of the afternoon was the fun comment by Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff; he noted the irony of hosting a cloud computing meeting at the facilities of the vendor most disrupted by the trend.)
During the "pitch" section of the afternoon, Justin Santa Barbara of startup FathomDB announced that the company has released to beta a sort of virtual managed hosting service for "standard relational databases" running on EC2. (There is a video of the afternoon's pitches; FathomDB starts at about 49:30.)
The startup's current service simply allows someone to get a basic RDBMS instance (initially MySQL) up and running in minutes under their management, with services including creation, monitoring and backup.
What I found most powerful about FathomDB's presentation, however, was the set of analytic tools they have built into their interface. Not only can you track high level data such as inserts and reads per minute, but you can also drill down into the data to find exactly which queries are most expensive, and how often they are run. Depending on how they price it (which is yet to be determined, but will be pay-as-you-go) this could be a very cost effective way to get high end database analytics at a low cost of entry.
My collegue, David Bernstein, noted in the question period after the presentation that he was hoping for a much more high-scale, distributed RDBMS model. When asked if that was in the cards, Santa Barbara responded FathomDB was indeed considering such technology for future versions of the software. Today, however, they were focusing on scaling vertically, not horizontally--though developers could partition databases themselves if they wished.
The second news item came from an article by The Register's Gavin Clarke:
Microsoft's SQL Data Services (SDS) development manager Nigel Ellis has promised attendees at next month's Mix 09 will see "a great session about SQL Data Services, including how the service has evolved to provide rich relational database capabilities"...
...The Windows Azure Storage director Brad Caldwell, meanwhile, has promised you'll learn how to create blobs, tables, and queues in Windows Azure Storage.
Senior program manager David Robinson separately wrote on the SDS team blog Microsoft would be unveiling some new features that are going to "knock your socks off" at Mix 09.
Microsoft has been working on a SQL Server based distributed cloud database for some time. SDS (formerly SQL Server Database Services, or SSDS) started at a non-relational unstructured data store, much like S3, but the team has worked hard to get the technology to where it now supports basic structured, semi-structured and unstructured data with some standard relational capabilities.
What the article is reporting is that Microsoft is apparently readying some big announcements around database services for MIX09, and that extending the relational capabilities of SDS is among the talking points. If you are using Azure, or awaiting access to the beta, this is very interesting news indeed.
It should be noted that there is much skepticism about how well a relational database system will perform in a distributed cloud computing environment. If your code is running in compute capacity on the same local network environment as the database, you are probably OK (e.g. hitting SDS from Azure or FathomDB from Amazon). On the other hand, running many short queries over the Internet from an application running in your own data center is probably prohibitively slow. Will that limit the markets for each of these vendor's products?
I believe Microsoft's offering will be dominant for Azure applications. FathomDB doesn't share the same guaranteed developer base, however. I will be watching closely to see what uptake there is for RDBMS in the capital-C Cloud.
-----------------------------BY James Urquhart
Source：cnet
James Urquhart is a seasoned field technologist with almost 20 years of experience in distributed systems development and deployment, focusing on service-oriented architectures, cloud computing, and virtualization. James is currently market manager for the Data Center 3.0 strategy at Cisco Systems, though the opinions expressed here are strictly his own. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.
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