7 DBaaS Vendors You Should Consider

Amazon Web Services (AWS) calls its Aurora, MySQL-compatible database-as-a-service a “commercial-grade database engine at open-source cost.” That's in addition to its NoSQL service DynamoDB and relational database service Amazon RDS. Aurora claims to offer five times the performance of MySQL at one-tenth the cost of a commercial DBaaS, a clear swipe at Oracle. It boasts of automatic resizing of databases without disruption, from a starting point of 10GB to 64TB. Customers can create up to 15 replicas of databases that can spread across three geographical zones. Database volume can be replicated in 10GB chunks, in six ways. Amazon offers granular pay-for-what-you-use pricing.

ClearDB‘s database virtualization services for native cloud and hybrid database-as-a-service applications are available through cloud providers including Amazon AWS, CenturyLink AppFog, IBM Bluemix, Salesforce.com's Heroku, Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Microsoft Azure. In awarding ClearDB its Product Leadership Award, Frost & Sullivan lauded its broad deployment options; high availability; geo-distributed, redundant clusters that enhance reliability; and secure architecture that eliminates complexity. A free trial subscription is available through the Heroku platform and on Microsoft Azure.

Tesora, based on the open-source Trove project, offers a scalable OpenStack database-as-a-service platform that supports 13 popular SQL and NoSQL data stores — Cassandra, CouchBase, CouchDB, DataStax Enterprise, DB2, MariaDB, MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle, Percona Server, PostgreSQL, Redis and Vertica — with several more under development. It touts being the leading contributor to the Trove project, along with the likes of HP, eBay and Red Hat, and the only Trove-based DBaaS offering both a free community version and a commercial implementation. Beyond basic provisioning, Tesora automates the lifecycle management of the database instances it provisions, including tasks such as backup, clustering, replication and failover, providing unified and simplified administration for a diverse set of database technologies.

CenturyLink earlier this year launched its Relational DB service, a MySQL-compatible relational DBaaS, billed as specifically tailored to the needs of app developers. It's building on its acquisition of Orchestrate, which provides a NoSQL solution, and tightly integrating the new DBaaS with other virtualization and networking services. Relational DB promises to easily scale your CPU, memory and storage with a click of a button. It's offered as a standalone solution as well as on the AppFog platform-as-a-service used to deploy cloud-native applications. One of CenturyLink's claims to fame in the DBaaS market is having a broad infrastructure as the third-largest telecommunications company in the United States.

ElephantSQL offers PostgreSQL -as-a-service supporting myriad clouds, including AWS, Softlayer, Google Compute Engine, Windows Azure and application platforms such as Heroku and BlueMix. As a full-featured, open source relational DBMS, PostgreSQL boasts many characteristics designed to support high-transaction, mission-critical applications. ElephantSQL handles a range of administrative tasks such as installation, upgrades to latest stable version and backup handling. It's integrated with the AppHarbor .NET platform-as-a-service and app development platform CloudControl.

GEMServers‘ newly announced DBaaS offering Ultra is powered by DeepSQL and the Google Compute Engine. Rather than providing “off the shelf” offerings, GemServers aims to provide a DBaaS tailored to customers' needs. DeepSQL , from Deep Information Systems, is a drop-in MySQL replacement. It's touted as “self-tuning” and designed to run data streaming, transactions and analytics at cloud scale concurrently – and it boasts of massive performance improvements over other popular offerings.

Google Cloud Bigtable is designed for large ingestion, analytics and data-heavy service workloads. It also offers Cloud SQL. Built internally, Bigtable is the NoSQL technology used for core Google services such as Search, Maps and Gmail. It claims single-digit millisecond latency, high throughput and “over twice the performance per dollar” of comparable self-managed NoSQL solutions. It also boasts of a familiar data interface: the Apache HBase API. The company bills it as ideal for large-scale, low-latency applications as well as throughput-intensive data processing and analytics.

While heavy hitters like Oracle and Microsoft hope to dominate the database-as-a-service (DBaaS) market, they face competition from Google, Amazon and others.