

The Future of SQL in a SaaS world: Announcing Zoho CloudSQL  - svrishi
http://writer.zoho.com/corporate/mailzoho.com/vaca/SQL-in-a-SaaSy-world

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sridharvembu
(I am the CEO of Zoho) Let me provide some context on this. What we are doing
is to separate the two layers in a database that have traditionally been so
welded together that you don't even think of them as two layers: the SQL
processing "logical" layer and the storage "physical" layer.

Our real technology here is a multi-dialect SQL processing engine, which can
handle a wide variety of SQL dialects with ease (ANSI, Oracle, SQL Server,
DB2, MySQL, Postgres being the major variants). At AdventNet, we have offered
a product called SwisSQL to companies, for SQL migration, conversion etc. for
a while (4+ years now). We couple that technology with physical storage or
other APIs underneath.

Once you decouple the two layers, a lot of possibilities open up. The "slow,
risky, inefficient" part is really a function of how efficient the middleware
is in processing a variety of SQL dialects and translating it to what the
physical layer needs.

SQL is the mainstay of business information processing. We are using the
standard everyone loves (or loves to hate in some cases!) and bring it to the
cloud computing era. Our goal is to preserve compatibility for existing
applications - hence our JDBC driver etc. - while drastically lowering the
cost. Today's announcement is only the first step on a long road ahead.

To add a hacker news dimension, I have long been fascinated with relational
data modeling. I have always believed that welding together storage with
relational models was a disservice to Codd's brilliant work. There are a lot
more ways in which relational modeling power can be exploited without tying it
so closely to a specific storage context.

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sridharvembu
For convenience, the JDBC client API is available at:

<http://zohoreportsapi.wiki.zoho.com/Java-Client-Library.html>

The Google AppEngine version of Python library is at:
[http://zohoreportsapi.wiki.zoho.com/Google-App-Client-
Librar...](http://zohoreportsapi.wiki.zoho.com/Google-App-Client-Library.html)

Stand-alone Python library is at: [http://zohoreportsapi.wiki.zoho.com/Python-
Client-Library.ht...](http://zohoreportsapi.wiki.zoho.com/Python-Client-
Library.html)

------
tectonic
Interestingly similar to Yahoo!'s YQL. <http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/>

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mrkurt
It sounds neat, but I can't get their examples to work at all.

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sridharvembu
Can you tell us which ones you tried? I apologize for this opening day glitch.

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j2d2
_Username cannot be less than 6 characters_

Why?

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gibsonf1
It looks like Zoho is not to be underestimated! What a great idea.

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henning
Sounds expensive, slow, risky, and inefficient to me.

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jmtulloss
Yes. It's a hard problem. The coolest solutions are solutions to hard
problems.

If they've pulled it off, that would be totally bad ass. Knowing Zoho, they're
probably pretty close.

