Cloud Databases - FY11's "hot" ticket

I'm going to be completely unoriginal and predict that FY11 will be the year of "Cloud Databases"!

I spent a few minutes yesterday poking around on database.com and I'm thinking this could be as big a disruptive technology as any that have come our way. Note here: I love the domain name and tried to register it back in the late 90's but it was taken. Here are some notes and thoughts on cloud databases:

1) They are going to be so talked about in FY11 that people will feel "left out" if they aren't doing it.

2) Database.com is hosted by Salesforce.com (and it's child site force.com, yet another awesome domain name), so any concerns about security of your "corporate data" are going to get squashed since people have been keeping one of their most private sets of data (customer data) on Salesforce.com for years.



3) API heaven - both SOAP for the Software Engineers who are fixated on WSDL and REST for the REST of us.

4) Cheap! For small applications (less than a couple hundred users) it's going to be a no brainer for small shops and folks building smaller applications.

5) No SQL - Kind of breaks my heart a bit, I wish they had built ODBC and JDBC drivers so our reporting tools and standard query tools weren't left in the dark. Not having SQL is going to cause folks to have to dump this data down to spreadmarts to do analysis and custom reporting. This could get very ugly, very quickly.

6) We really need a cooler name for this than "Cloud Databases", something like "Thunder" would be nice.

7) Did I mention that everyone's going to want to try it out because all the cool kids are doing it?

8) No more backups, storage requests right before the end of fiscal years and all the other things DBA's talk about all the time.

9) ...ahhh... Did I say no more backups? What happens when someone does something stupid (like removes a table or something)? This happens all the time, it's happened at my current shop a few times and I can remember about 7 or 8 instances of people doing the big "oops" during my career - note here I am not admitting to being the one who "oops'd".

10) What about those "other" DBA things, like indexing, partitioning, tuning, building development, test and QA databases? Will these things go by the wayside?



Clearly a game changer and something we'll all have to keep our eye on. It's doubtful database.com will have any large scale applications deployed on it until it matures, but mature it will, the market will demand it. Interestingly enough Google Trends has it as a non-entity, I'd bet a pizza that this will change by the end of FY11.



We're sure to hear tons about it over the next year, right? Where do you think it's going to go?

Until next time...Rich

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