When Microsoft announced it was bringing query processing and storage
capabilities into the cloud with its SQL Server Data Services offering,
industry watchers took notice.
Time will tell, however, whether other major database players will follow
suit with offerings of their own.
Microsoft's SQL Server Data Services is not exactly SQL Server on the Web;
instead, it is meant as a scalable on-demand data storage and query processing
Web service comparable, some analysts said, to Amazon's SimpleDB service.
But Microsoft's move comes at a time when there is increasing interest in
online data storage, and leapfrogs plays by startups such as LongJump and
more established companies such as EnterpriseDB to push databases into the
cloud.
Still, Gartner analyst Donald Feinberg was skeptical as to whether the other
two largest database vendors, IBM and Oracle,
would follow Microsoft's lead.
"Maybe, but IBM more so than
Oracle," Feinberg speculated. "Building the fabric to support this is
expensive. That is why Amazon, Google, etc. have done it, as they already have
the fabric and the knowledge to grow it."
With this offering, Microsoft is positioning itself to ensure that it will
be one of a handful of clouding computing platform providers, said Matthew
Aslett, an analyst with The 451 Group.
"As IBM and Sun deliver their own
cloud computing platforms, they too can be expected to deliver similar online
data storage and query capabilities," Aslett said. "Like SimpleDB,
this is not a fully fledged hosted relational database but a simple storage and
query service, and this is not competitive with the likes of Oracle
Database."
To hear Microsoft tell it, the benefits of SQL Server Data Services lie in
slashing the initial cost of investment in hardware and software and the
perpetual cost of storage maintenance.
"Microsoft SSDS (SQL Server Data Services) enables customers to scale
easily as data volume grows without any additional provisioning and operational
investment," said Tudor Toma, group program manager at SQL Server.
"Customers can query and modify data as required by the specific business
scenarios."
The service supports standards-based REST (Representational State Transfer) and
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) interfaces designed to work with any
Internet-development tool kit, and the primary wire format is XML, he said.
"Developers and service providers can quickly run applications with
ease," Toma added. "The data has flexible schema which can be
modified dynamically by the application. SSDS is built on industry-proven SQL
Server database technology and provides business-ready services covering high
availability, security and reliability."
Still, there are issues that may slow adoption of in-the-cloud databases:
among them, security and pricing. Microsoft officials would provide no
specifics about the pricing plan for SSDS, which for now is an invitation-only beta.
An open beta is slated for later in 2008, Toma said.
"Given the potential data security, privacy and
reliability concerns, enterprises should think carefully about what data they
would be prepared to deploy to a database in the cloud at this early stage, but
they should also be evaluating the potential hardware, software and maintenance
savings that might be delivered by storing and querying non-sensitive data in
the cloud," Aslett said.
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