

Ask HN: Outsourced SQL Providers? - SamAtt

Hi everyone,<p>I've been asked by my boss to explore the option of outsourcing part of our data to an external SQL provider.  So I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations as far as companies they’ve worked with.<p>Our primary concern here is uptime and we’re willing to pay a decent amount for it (e.g. a $20 shared hosting solution is not what we’re looking for)<p>Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated.<p>Thanks in advance,<p>Sam<p>P.S.  One thing I forgot to say.  It has to be either MS-SQL or MySQL.  We don't want to use something like Amazon SimpleDB because this experiment in outsourcing might fail and we want to be able to bring that data back to a local server.
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SwellJoe
Have you thought about the latency increase inherent in moving your database
across the city or state or country? You may be surprised by how large an
impact this can have on overall application performance.

YC company FathomDB (<http://fathomdb.com>) set off on this path and have/had
some interesting ideas about caching and such. I think they settled down to
specifically providing service to EC2 users, so they could insure nearness and
low-latency. The latency problem is an extremely difficult one to solve. I
believe there have been a couple of other YC companies chasing similar
dragons. I don't know their names off-hand. But, databases are an obviously
large market ripe for change, so there's going to be some money made
there...and so there are probably dozens of companies laboring away on the
problem as we speak.

Why are you looking to outsource? You might consider just outsourcing the
backup and data retention, instead, since backups as a service is well-
understood and has lots of providers.

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SamAtt
We're looking at outsourcing a few of our non-secure applications because
management is unpredictable. They will, without any warning, just decide they
need to give x group of employees a computer and we'll have to add 20
computers to the network within the next week or so. Given that volatility we
need to be able to scale quickly on the server side. That's led us to EC2 but
we need a database for all those instances to pull off of.

Oh, and thanks for the suggestion :)

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bayareaguy
Too bad you're not willing to consider PostgreSQL. I would have suggested
<http://www.commandprompt.com>

~~~
SamAtt
I just hadn't thought of it. I'll give it a look. Thanks!

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there
what type of data are you storing and what type of application is retrieving
it? i would imagine the latency between your network and the sql provider's
would hurt performance badly.

most web hosting providers can give you a sql database but in those instances
it works well because your website is probably running on the same local
network as their sql server.

~~~
SamAtt
We're doing this specifically to test but I don't see latency being a serious
issue. The apps only pull text of about 1k at any given time and we have a
40Mbps connection so assuming we find a service in the U.S. I can't see it
being a problem.

