Microsoft launches its alternative to Amazon's SimpleDB
Microsoft has begun signing up testers for SQL Server Data Services (SSDS), codenamed "Sitka," a forthcoming service that will allow customers and developers to host their data in a Microsoft-hosted database.
Microsoft officials were reticent to compare SQL Server Data Services to offerings from any competitors. But Gartner Vice President David Smith said the new Microsoft service was comparable to a service like Amazon's SimpleDB.
SimpleDB, which Amazon released into public beta in December 2007, is a complement and adjunct to the company's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and Simple Data Storage Service (S3). It allows customers to store, modify and query data hosted in the cloud.
According to Microsoft's frequently-asked-questions document on its Web site, users can host an unlimited amount of data via SSDS.
Microsoft is expecting small-to-mid-size businesses; developers and service providers hosting data-intensive and "mashup on-demand applications"; and enterprise customers building edge applications interested in collaborating on large or shared data sets to be the primary customers for the service. Among the target applications Microsoft foresees as being prime targets for this kind of storage service: archival data, reference data, and business applications like HR services, healthcare records-management and social-networking apps, among others.
Microsoft announced on March 5 that it has started signing up testers for SSDS and that the external beta will begin in a couple of weeks. The company has been testing SSDS internally for the past few months, said David Campbell, a Technical Fellow in Microsoft's Data Storage Platform Division.
Campbell, with whom I chatted at Microsoft's Mix '08 conference this week, denied that SSDS is anything like Amazon's hosted services. When I asked him what rival service was most like SSDS, he didn't offer an answer.
Campbell, instead, volunteered all of the products that SSDS is not like. SSDS is not a hosted version of SQL Server. It is not "SQL Online," a Microsoft-hosted version of SQL Server, in the vein of SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Office Communication Server Online.
"We are taking SQL Server apart and running it on hardware we see in datacenters," Campbell said -- typically blade servers with SATA drives.
He noted that Microsoft also is going to be available locally, too -- a plan which confused me. Why would customers want to run on-premise SSDS if they can run on-premise SQL Server? Campbell said an on-premise SSDS will allow users to better synchronize between the enterprise and the cloud, especially when handling reporting, analytics and business-intelligence tasks.
Would you be interested in having Microsoft store your data in a SQL Server database in the cloud?