Salesforce.com today announced “Database.Com,” a new service that it’s calling the first “enterprise database built for the cloud,” leveraging the infrastructure and technology that powers it’s core business of 87,000 Salesforce.com customers. The service isn’t scheduled to be available until 2011, maybe they can can come up with a better logo before the service goes live.
Database.com was built from the ground up to power new enterprise applications that are cloud, mobile and social. Database.com is open for use with any language, platform and device and it enables developers to focus on building applications instead of tuning, maintaining and scaling databases.
“We see cloud databases as a massive market opportunity that will power the shift to enterprise applications that are natively cloud, mobile and social,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com.
For CIOs, IT departments and developers, Database.com provides many benefits over client/server databases:
Developers can write their applications in Java, C#, Ruby, PHP and other languages and can run their apps on any platform – Force.com, VMforce, Amazon EC2, Google AppEngine, Heroku or Microsoft Azure.
Applications can run natively on any device, like an Android phone, Blackberry, iPad, or iPhone. These apps can all make calls using the Database.com APIs securely over the Internet.
• iPhone and iPad app developers can write native iOS apps. These apps run natively on Apple devices and connect to Database.com over the Internet.
• Android developers can write native Android apps using Java. These apps run natively on Android devices and connect to Database.com.
• Web developers can build apps on Amazon EC2 using PHP and connect to Database.com.
• Java developers can write an application that runs on VMforce and connects to Database.com.
Security Features
Database.com uses the security technologies built into salesforce.com’s global service delivery infrastructure, offering SSL, single-sign on, identity confirmation and anti-phishing tools. It also provides secure access, including user and role-based security and sharing rules and row-level data security. Database.com has also received some of the most stringent security certifications in the industry, including ISO 27001, SAS 70 Type II and SysTrust. Database.com powers salesforce.com’s service, and is one of the world’s largest enterprise databases, containing more than 20 billion records and delivering more than 25 billion transactions per fiscal quarter at an average response time of less than 300 milliseconds.
Database.com combines the best features of enterprise databases, such as user management, row-level security, triggers, stored procedures, authentication and powerful APIs, with the benefits of cloud computing: no hardware or software to manage, automatic scalability, upgrades, backups, and disaster recovery. It also includes a new social data model, new developer console and more:
• Relational data store: Proven, secure and trusted database, including tables, relationships, support for a wide variety of field types, triggers and stored procedures, a query language and enterprise search;
• File storage: for documents, video, images and more;
• SOAP and REST APIs: Database.com includes standard web services APIs, making it easy for developers to access their database.com data;
• Social data model: New kinds of apps require new data models. Database.com includes a pre-built social data model for feeds, user profiles, status updates, and a following model for all database records. Database.com includes social APIs that developers can use to easily interact with the social components of their data models. For example, they can specify followers for database records or request data feeds to display real-time data updates;
• Automatic elasticity: Database.com is built for Internet scale with automatic tuning, upgrades, backups and replication to remote data centers, and automatic creation of sandboxes for development, test and training;
• Identity and Authentication: Access can be managed via oAuth or SAML. Database.com provides user management features including identity/profiles and authentication;
• Row-level security: Point-and-click tools allow developers to define data security access rules down to the row-level. These rules drive filtering logic that for all database queries from custom apps built on top of Database.com;
• Enterprise search: Database.com includes powerful enterprise search services. Developers can access a full-text search engine that automatically respects enterprise security rules;
• Tools: Database.com includes a new developer console and ETL tools. Salesforce.com has made a series of developer toolkits available separately to accelerate app development.
A developer toolkit will be available and supports Java, .NET, Ruby and PHP, iOS and Android , Google AppEngine, Google Data, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Facebook, and Twitter, and Adobe Flash/Flex.
Database.com will be free for 3 users, and up to 100,000 records and 50,000 transactions/month. After that, charges $10/month for each set of 100,000 records beyond that and $10/month for each set of 150,000 transactions beyond that.