Feb 28 2008
Database in new Avatar
SaaS - Software as a Service. If you have anything to do with information technology, you must have heard this buzzword. Industry leaders are talking about it for a while and there are some success stories as well.
I heard about it for the first time when I was with Oracle, way back in 2004-05. They have coined Oracle On Demand. Wherein, Oracle used to host & manage database instances for their customers. But it wasn’t ideal implementation of SaaS as customers need to shell out license cost for instances irrespective of its hosting environment and usage.
But, Amazon has given new paradigm to it with its SimpleDB. It’s a web service for executing queries on structured data stored in Amazon hosted environment. What amuse me is not executing query by invoking web service, but innovation they brought in for storage structure. The data will be stored in domains, like excel spread-sheets. This will yield more flexibility as you need not pre-define all data points. You can easily add new attributes as and when it is required. The newly added attributes will be automatically indexed in real time.
You can read more on it and host of related services at AWS
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