Amazon’s attack on Oracle, IBM: Adds el-cheapo Relational Database to its Cloud!
By Tarry Singh at 27 October, 2009, 4:39 am
Well I guess after Oracle’s MySQL stake it wil only help Oracle make more money there so it’s IBM that is under solid attack unless ofcourse IBM buys postgres or something else and does the same with it.
Amazon RDS is designed for developers or businesses who require the full features and capabilities of a relational database, or who wish to migrate existing applications and tools that utilize a relational database. It gives you access to the full capabilities of a MySQL 5.1 database running on your own Amazon RDS database instance.
To use Amazon RDS, you simply:
- Launch a database instance (DB Instance), selecting the DB Instance class and storage capacity that best meets your needs.
- Select the desired retention period (in number of days) for your automated database backups. Amazon RDS will automatically back up your database during your predefined backup window. For typical workloads, this allows you to restore to any point in time within your retention period, up to the last five minutes. You can also restore from a DB Snapshot, a user-initiated backup that can be run at any time with a simple API call.
- Connect to your DB Instance using your favorite database tool or programming language. Since you have direct access to a full-featured MySQL database, any tool designed for the MySQL engine will work unmodified with Amazon RDS.
- Monitor the compute and storage resource utilization of your DB Instance, for no additional charge, via Amazon CloudWatch. If at any point you need additional capacity, you can scale the compute and storage resources associated with your DB Instance with a simple API call.
- Pay only for the resources you actually consume, based on your DB Instance hours consumed, database storage, backup storage, and data transfer.
No related posts.
Amazon RDS allows you to select your “class” of server on which to run MySQL. Like Goldilocks and the 3 bears, you choose the size that fits your needs. Then “scaling” you shut down the application, move RDS to a bigger/smaller instance and rollback any uncommitted transactions, then restart the application. It provides options on the scale of the single server. It also automates some steps. But this is not the elastic scalability one would expect from the “Elastic Cloud”.
Amazon offers SimpleDB which is simple key-value store. It isn’t ACID-compliant, no transaction support, no SQL BUT is scales in an elastic manner. Then they have RDS which provides those other things, BUT no elasticity. The complement to these offerings would be http://www.scaledb.com which provides the best of both worlds: SQL. ACID-compliant, transactions, elasticity PLUS clustering, high-availability, cluster-level load balancing and more.
Your initial sub-heading includes the phrase “unless of course IBM buys postgres…”.
Since this is a potentially misleading suggestion I think it’s important to be clear that IBM can’t actually “buy postgres” because:
1. unlike MySQL is not owned by a single company, the source code is not copyrighted and is made available under a BSD license. Oracle was able to buy MySQL AB because it was the copyright holder for MySQL.
2. unlike MySQL, PostGreSQL does not have any dependencies on other proprietary software which can be bought. Oracle was able to buy InnoDB because it was also proprietary software.
http://www.innodb.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InnoDB
You may wish to amend your article to make this clear.
IBM could of course build a similar database element into their compute cloud offering and charge for it as a service, but they would not be doing this on the basis of owning the software which would expose them to greater risk and maintenance costs than if they used one of their own proprietary products e.g. DB2/UDB (i.e. Informix).