Cloud Computing: Where's My RDBMS?

By Alex Yakima

It is exciting fact that cloud computing is getting more and more attention from all kinds of businesses. Evidently businesses like the idea of "on-demand computing capacity", virtually unlimited, but paying as you go. And much more on the table actually. Although there were weak links too. One of them - data persistence mechanisms. Indeed Amazon WS S3 wasn't ever a full-fledge database.


Google app engine has similar issue. Its data storage capabilities are limited to querying only one table at a time using GQL language, Google analogue for SQL. The reason you can't join multiple tables in GQL is design approach.

Different story with MS Azure - Microsoft claims support for MS SQL Services from the very beginning, the only issue is that unlike AWS, Azure still ain't in a production mode. So there's lots of unknown.


Overall, let's try taking closer look at a problem. Quite possibly that position like Google's of complying to some severe design principles to ensure platform reliability and elasticity is making lots of sense, but all these years tens of thousands development teams were cultivating very effective approach to building software applications - using relational database at the back-end. Over time relational DBMSes matured on one hand. On the other - application development platforms "learned" to access many different DBMSes and even using conceptually different approaches ("wrappers" akin to ADO.NET or JDBC vs ORMs like Hibernate etc). In other words,

Software development world fully addicted to managing data with relational databases

...and again, good or bad but it works. Now what? Changing direction to quite different? Not very likely... Because RDBMSes do not disappear from the horizon of Cloud Platforms. One of the examples - Microsoft SQL Server on Azure. Another one would be Amazon-Oracle partnership that now allows AWS developers licensing Oracle products on the AWS platform. And that is good sign because the easyest way of attracting businesses to Cloud Computing platforms is letting them port their applications to it with minimal (or no) modification. And so now having at least three big players on the market it is quite safe to assume that RDBMS itself is a great incentive for both CC providers and application developers.

...which is good