

One Database To Rule The Cloud: Salesforce Debuts Database.com - vdondeti
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/07/one-database-to-rule-the-cloud-salesforce-debuts-database-com-for-the-enterprise/

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jasonkester
They seem to have exactly positioned themselves in a spot that will ensure
that nobody ever uses them.

Cloud databases are what you reluctantly use when you realize that your thing
is going to need to scale _big_. Database.com is prohibitively expensive for
anything but tiny datasets and low traffic. Oops.

So while it would be great for running your in-house inventory application,
there's no compelling reason to migrate off your existing (possibly free)
relational database infrastructure.

And while it would be be great to be able to handle tons of requests to tons
of data at the low latency they quote, you can do that on AWS for 1/1000 the
cost.

~~~
yxhuvud
Great? 300 ms in response time would make it slow as dirt in many many
situations.

~~~
al_james
...but perfectly acceptable in many cases.

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rpmcb
Database.com is so ugly and unprofessional looking I at first thought it was a
spam site and actually had to double check the URL.

~~~
uast23
Do you aim to change the definition of "ugly"? The site is good-looking and
totally professional with some good features. Read rest of the comments to
know more :)

~~~
Kudos
I can't tell if this is sarcasm. The site looks like it was designed by a
versatile programmer who knows what attributes a good-looking site should
have, but can't reproduce it himself.

~~~
uast23
No sarcasm here. I really want to know that as a user what is driving you off
that site?

~~~
tryeng
JPEG artifacts on the logo, The arrow images left to "Cloud", "Open", "Social"
and "Secure" are not antialiased. The arrow in the search box is below the
center of the box, and lots of other minor issues that makes it look really
awful.

~~~
uast23
Kudos for having an eye for detail, and I agree on the anti-aliasing part.
Much appreciated. But aesthetic details are just a subset of professionalism,
its not professionalism all by itself. The site has different section for
intro, pricing, faq, blog and moreover they have a well done short video
explaining what Database.com is about. These details are professional enough
for a user to stick.

~~~
ergo98
Are they? Like the OP of this thread, my immediate impression was that I was
at the wrong site. It just feels like a domain squatting site, really
(especially the "database.com" in the upper left. Here in the 20xxs it just
isn't that impressive that you got a dictionary word domain, so stop being so
impressed with it).

~~~
uast23
Seriously? Which domain squatting site has so much of information and a video
which explains it's service! Just because it's 2010, does not mean that no one
can have a dictionary word domain. They probably had lot of money to spend so
they got it.

I am not hugely impressed by the artwork of the site but it is definitely not
the worst site that I have seen

~~~
notahacker
Many spammers know how to embed a YouTube video (it uses the YouTube
player...), and I'm not going to click through to the other information if I
think I'm on a cybersquatter page. They presumably spent at least a mid six
figure sum* on the domain back in July, which makes the amateurish landing
page even more embarrasing.

It's not the worst site I've seen, but I've seen better landing pages designed
as weekend projects by people who then post on here with all the appropriate
"I'm not a designer...can you give me some help please" questions and get
advised to commission a freelancer who knows a bit about colour schemes as
well as having the time and skill to add polish. For a major launch from a
massive corporation whose products are (theoretically) driven by good UI and a
consistent corporate image
[http://www.salesforce.com/assets/pdf/misc/SFDC_StyleGuide120...](http://www.salesforce.com/assets/pdf/misc/SFDC_StyleGuide1206.pdf)
it's quite shameful.

*reserve price if you wanted to buy at auction earlier in the year was $800,000

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ordinaryman
I am not sure if an app running on a different cloud platform like (Google App
Engine / Azure / etc.,) can make use of Database.com and still provide decent
response time to user requests.

This service will be helpful for pre-generating reports having queries which
span across multiple tables (JOINS) and which can use aggregate queries
(SUM/COUNT/MAX/MIN/etc.,.), both of which are currently not possible with
Google App Engine's BigTable. But with Google already working on full-featured
SQL database support
(<http://code.google.com/appengine/business/roadmap.html>), I don't think I
will use it for such an use-case too.

~~~
epynonymous
right, i agree, it would be good for schemas that require heavy database
processing.

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viraptor
I've noticed something interesting about this service. They mention that they
support row-level security. If they also support anything like stored
procedures, you could basically allow your service to contact database.com
directly from the side - no hosting- roundtrip.

~~~
jwn
I found that to be inferred elsewhere in the article as well. If true, it's a
_very_ interesting feature. Imagine being able to leave out the middleware web
layer entirely and securely have direct access to data within the app!

~~~
Swannie
Hmm, a move towards a pure big-phat-server:thin-client architecture? Not
pretty.

"Best practice" moved away from that because our databases were struggling
with stored procedures on top of their regular work.

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tocomment
Wouldn't that slow down an application to have every database call go over the
internet?

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jarito
This is my question. 300 milliseconds is nice, but once you add HTTP overhead,
then TLS overhead, it will be almost impossible for your site to respond to
YOUR user in less than a second or two.

We'll see in 2011 I guess.

~~~
arethuza
There are other cloud-based database services out there - and from my (fairly
limited) experience the latency involved is rather noticeable.

It might be different if you do bulk uploads of data and then spend a lot of
time querying it and retrieving relatively small reports - but that's probably
not what most applications spend their time doing.

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frisco
> "We see cloud databases as a massive market opportunity that will power the
> shift to real-time enterprise applications that are natively cloud, mobile
> and social."

Wow; that's an _impressively_ high corporate-buzz-word-speak ratio. I guess if
we take it literally, though, I guess AT&T and IBM employees have real-time,
cloud-based social internal apps to look forward to (IBMVille?).

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geophile
$10/month/100k records? That is outrageously expensive, even ignoring the
transaction costs.

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risotto
A much better summary of the service than the techcrunch article:

[http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-
News/S...](http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-
News/Salesforce-Announces-Database.com-the-Enterprise-Database-Built-for-the-
Cloud-72400.aspx)

The enterprise security compliance can not be understated.

This is an extremely powerful service that any of us can sip on cheaply. It
probably doesn't fit your use cases, but those saying it is too expensive or
offers nothing over other database software or services are missing the point.

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rbranson
If you're curious how SalesForce is pulling this off from an architectural
point of view, check this video:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MZZDI18opk>

It's mostly built on Oracle RAC.

~~~
chunkbot
Oracle RAC? That explains why it's so expensive.

~~~
snissn
and the entire premise of the first paragraph of the article is flawed:

"""Oracle has dominated the database market, especially following its $7.4
billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems. But today, its “frenemy”
Salesforce.com will become more of a competitor with the launch of
Database.com, the company’s enterprise database built for the cloud."""

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ZoFreX
Would it kill them to spend two minutes checking for spelling mistakes /
typos?

Poor reporting aside, I think this product is... no, I don't know, because the
article gave no concrete information at all. Except of course that it's _in
the cloud!_

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netghost
I kept wanting to pull out a red pen while reading the article. Ack, I'm not
even that obsessive about grammar.

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cash_coleman
We just released (as in literally 5 hours ago) a competitor to database.com
called ClearDB. Our solution is much simpler than theirs is and is priced much
more attractively (starter accounts get 400K calls per month for free). We're
actually looking for folks to check it out and give feedback. Would you folks
mind having a look around? Check it out - www.cleardb.com.

~~~
jere_jones
How will you handle varying security levels? I don't want to put my principle
username and password into an app that I distribute that can literally do
anything to my databases. Can you or will you be able to have multiple
users/access levels per account?

~~~
cash_coleman
That's something that's definitely in the pipeline.

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Kilimanjaro
While having a database online is a cool thing, they need to start offering
basic hosting to make this really kick off.

Roundtrips will be the major bottleneck, so the solution would be to never
leave the server. So, hosting apps like AppEngine is the only way.

Or, just offer online databases but with an access-like interface (plenty of
potential use cases here) so people store and use the data right there,
possibly offering a great reporting tool (like what Crystal used to be eons
ago) with a casual REST request for external reports and stuff, but never for
external intensive use.

~~~
elblanco
<https://www.salesforce.com/platform/> may service that need, but I'm not
entirely sure of the capabilities of the platform w/r to web apps.

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jpwagner
Lot of Salesforce haters here. A couple of counterpoints to reactions:

-Remember that Salesforce is targeting large enterprise deals. Sure they want to be developer friendly, but "in the cloud" is overused because there are so many legacy on-premise SAP/Oracle/etc systems.

-The costs should not be compared to AWS, but instead to AWS + the cost of a developer headcount. One of Salesforce's goals it seems is to make it so once implemented minor changes to structure and process are able to be done by business users.

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icey
I was just checking out force.com and left pretty quickly after discovering
they want $50 / user per month. Makes it pretty hard to make money that way.

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jpwagner
_Makes it pretty hard to make money that way._

You say that as if it's hypothetical...but actually their numbers are great.
<http://www.wikinvest.com/wiki/Crm>

$50/month means it pays for itself if you save that user ~1 hour in that month
(ie less than 1% productivity increase.)

If you take a cab from A to B, it costs way more than driving yourself, but
you don't have to own a car or know how to drive.

~~~
icey
Sorry, let me clarify. It makes it hard for _me_ to make money using their
platform if I have to pay them $50 / user / month.

Clearly it's very profitable for Salesforce.

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Jach
For what it's worth, LucidDB ( <http://luciddb.org/> ) has a Salesforce
foreign data wrapper for it. (
<http://pub.eigenbase.org/wiki/FarragoMedSalesforcePlugin> ) LucidDB's a
column-store standards-focused SQL database, which makes it a lot faster for
certain operations (and slower for others, like single row inserts).

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goombastic
My pet peeve with Salesforce is that getting to the data can be difficult
especially from other systems.

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epynonymous
correct me if i'm wrong, but this is something to use in conjunction with
existing cloud applications right? thanks techcrunch for another non-
informative article.

i imagine this wouldn't be something someone would consider to replace their
in-datacenter database solution, going over the WAN to access database data
would be awful.

i see this more as a service you would consider rolling up if you were already
using vmforce to add automatic database capabilities that could scale
according to demand.

anyone else have thoughts on this?

i wonder if they provide any partitioning automatically built in, that would
be cool.

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Eugene3v
I think it is geared more towards mobile apps, which rely on remote db calls
anyway.

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togasystems
A number of users mentioned removing middleware from their applications and
using this db directly.

Out of curiosity, how would one hide the db structure and secure it from
malicious users in a javascript app?

~~~
david927
I'm have competing technology that does this. First, you have to set
permissions carefully, of course. Then, if you don't mind users knowing
elements of your schema, you can simply make direct calls from Javascript. If
you do mind, you could create stored procedures. Or in the case of our
technology, you can also place server-side Javascript on the database and call
that.

~~~
togasystems
Interesting. So one would have to use the db permissions for each user instead
of one db user approach of modern web apps.

I guess all of the Man in Middle security considerations would still apply.

Does you service/users use triggers as security as well?

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david927
It can be role based, so you could still have one role for all users, such as
view and insert only for a forum. But our solution has an interesting twist:
security is managed like queries. For example, taking a sports social network,
a team's messages can be sent [an insert] by team members, but seen [view
rights] by members of the team and their friends. This is all set with two
statements.

It makes it so that you can go more often just directly to the database.

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mark_l_watson
I signed up. Figured why not try it out. I really like outsourcing as much as
I can (platform as a service like AppEngine and Heroku, datastores like
MongoHQ and Cloudant, etc.)

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eli
The obvious comparison seems like it would be with Amazon RDS

~~~
al_james
I think a better comparison would be Amazon Simple DB in terms of its use of
the cloud, but amazon RDS in terms of its relational model.

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zzzeek
SQL over a web service...speedy !

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andybak
.Net, Java, Ruby and PHP but no direct Python support?

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mattdeboard
"and more."

I think they just copy/pasted a press release.

~~~
andybak
No. I think with the purchase of Heroku it's clear they are betting big on
Ruby.

I hope this is good for the Ruby community. It could go either way.

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nathanwdavis
300 ms response time doesn't seem so good.

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GrandMasterBirt
Can this be compared to fathom db? <http://fathomdb.com/about/home>

Do we have anyone with experience with FDB on hn?

~~~
justinsb
FathomDB is much closer to Amazon RDS - MySQL-as-a-service. Every customer
gets their own MySQL instance, and accesses it over the MySQL protocol, using
normal SQL (the MySQL flavor at least). Database.com looks to be Salesforce
repackaging their wrapper which lets them do multitenancy in Oracle. You'll be
stuck with what the wrapper exposes, which isn't very SQL like, and certainly
won't be a drop-in replacement for any existing SQL applications. They aren't
offering Oracle-as-a-service.

In terms of latency, Amazon RDS and FathomDB both target applications running
on the same cloud as the database. I would imagine that would be the sweet
spot for database.com as well, but there are some applications where the
Internet latency could be tolerable.

