Salesforce.com will announce its new hosted service Database.com today at its Dreamforce in San Francisco. Database.com is a stand-alone service available via its SOAP and REST APIs to any language on any platform or device. – not just Force.com developers. Database.com will be generally available in 2011 and, like Force.com, will have a freemium pricing model. This new service brings Salesforce.com into competition with Oracle not just in CRM but in Oracle’s oldest turf: databases.
Database.com is the same relational database system that powers Salesforce.com, allowing developers to take advantage of the company’s infrastructure and scalability. Progress Software has written drivers to enable existing applications and off-the-shelf software to connect to Database.com
Database scalability is a major issue for today’s web applications. Various NoSQL solutions, as well as projects like VoltDB and Memcached attempt to solve this problem. Database.com is the latest solution and, given Salesforce.com’s track record, it will probably be an appealing one for cloud developers. According to Salesforce.com’s announcement, the database currently contains more than 20 billion records and delivers more than 25 billion transactions per quarter with a response time averaging less than 300 milliseconds.
Database.com will have be free for three users with up to 100,000 records and 50,000 transactions per month. It will cost $10 a month for each set of 100,000 records beyond that, and an additional $10 a month for each set of $150,000 transactions.
As noted, the Database.com can be used with any language and apps can be run from anywhere – your own datacenter, RackSpace, Amazon Web Services, Google AppEngine and even mobile devices. Although Salesforce.com keeps using the word “open” to describe it, make no mistake: this is a proprietary format.
Users will be able to export their data from Database.com, which is not a SQL database but is very similar. Using Progress Software’s DataDirect Connect drivers, users will be able to connect existing applications to Database.com. According to announcement from Progress, the company will add support for ODBC next.
Disclosure: Salesforce.com paid for a plane ticket and hotel room for Klint Finley to attend the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.
