The Joel on Software Discussion Group

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=26582&tag=content;col1

Anyone have any opinions on this?  It sounds great - a way to automatically scale out your databases without having to muck around in server and software configurations.  And unlike SimpleDB, this is a fully relational system so it should work with "traditional" applications.

This sounds like a great boon for new startups - you can code your application normally, host with EC2 so you can expand your server capacity, and now expand your database capacity infinitely.

I think it was sort of a no-brainer from their viewpoint. Microsoft has a similar offering based on SQL Server. The bulk of applications (certainly LOB types) use relational databases and it's something people are are very comfortable with and make things such as reporting much easier.

I think the end-result will be more rapid adoption of cloud services in general. As people become more familiar with other database paradigms such as SimpleDB they may move towards those but the relational offering eases this transition.

As a developer this has me pretty excited. Amazon keeps adding the functionality I want while taking away the pain points like backups and maintenance, where I know just enough to realize it's a bigger task than it initially looks.

If I was a DBA I'd start to look at where my future lies in a world of centralized, outsourced commodity DB service; these roles traditionally made significantly more $ than developers due to their specialized knowledge of intricate command-line parameters and such. If Amazon is going to do that for me the value of the DBA role just dropped, unless they do more than administer backups and disk space or are the absolutely best at what they do.

I'd also see this as an attack on MS's SQL Server Data Services; while MS is going to make VS 2010 heavily integrated with Azure, Amazon has made their RDBMS offering compatible from the start. You could conceivably switch to their service by changing a connection string. Azure will never be that simple. I think MySQL users and SQL Server users tend to be distinct groups though, so this softens the direct threat.

I think that Amazon's strategy of offering access to their infrastructure and capacity is brilliant; it's a long-term (like 10 year) game plan that is at the forefront of changing how a lot of IT services are delivered. The funny thing is that their stock is at historic highs not because of long term strategic plans to control internet infrastructure, but because they sold more books, lego and barbies last quarter and  because they project we're going to fall back in our bad habits and overspend this Christmas.

For some of my DESKTOP applications, I use the sql server database that is available from my web hosted provider.  So, a lot of us been doing this “cloud” computing thing for years now. I mean 25 databases for $12 a month type of thing is really cheap.

No question that in place of using sql that comes with web hosting, it is nice to have a service dedicated for JUST the database server. I find speed is really good even for desktop applications that hit these servers.

My first interactions of the software had me hosting sql server for my clients. However the upload, and THEN download speeds were ok, but not really great. The instant I elimination half the round trip (the upload from my sql server), then I found performance REALLY good.

So, yes…I am a big fan of hosted systems and the choices keep increasing by the day...

Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
kallal@msn.com

Is it Sarbanes-Oxley compatible?