News

Startup Readies Cloud-Based Relational Database

As Microsoft prepares to reveal its plans for a more robust offering of its emerging SQL Data Services, an obscure two-person company last week launched its own cloud-based relational database service.

FathomDB came out of stealth mode last Friday when it gave a presentation at the TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable held in Mountain View, Calif. Based on Sun Microsystems' MySQL and hosted on Amazon's EC2 cloud service, FathomDB is intended for Web-based companies with high transactional requirements.

"We are much more OLTP [online transaction processing] than OLAP [online analytical processing]," said Justin Santa Barbara, the company's founder. Ironically, Santa Barbara was a Microsoft Certified Partner in the United Kingdom who developed ASP.NET tools but decided to come to Silicon Valley and embrace cloud computing.

"There are a lot of cloud players that are looking at focusing on OLAP technology, whereas we are considering the more generic standard relational databases running transaction-oriented applications such as Web sites," he said.

FathomDB provides relational databases as a utility, he said, meaning applications can be ported to the database without changes. The company monitors the database, performs backups and automates DBA processes. While the chosen platform today is MySQL, Santa Barbara is not ruling out offering hosted versions of Oracle, Microsoft's SQL Server and other database platforms.

Nevertheless, FathomDB is a small company whose success remains to be seen, with just Santa Barbara and one developer for now. It is backed by an angel investment from Y Combinator, a Mountain View, Calif.-based  provider of seed funding to early-stage startups. While Santa Barbara declined to say how much Y Combinator has invested in FathomDB, Y Combinator rarely makes initial investments of more than $20,000, according to its Web site.

Companies are often reluctant to rely on a small, unproven, supplier business-critical services. One did, but it too (not coincidentally) is a Y Combinator-backed venture. WebMynd Corp., which offers a browser plug-in to provide sophisticated visual search services, is the first to host its site on FathomDB. The company runs and manages its Web and search servers on Amazon EC2 using the FathomDB database. "As a search service, our scaling and infrastructure requirements are significant," said Amir Nathoo, WebMynd's founder and CEO, in an e-mail.

Nathoo estimated it would have taken double the amount of time had the company decided to build and host its own database, which has scaled to handle 5 million new inserts per day. "The WebMynd team does not have extensive DBA skills, so in order to have achieved that scale ourselves, we would have had to either hire someone in or sacrifice development time to manage the database and learn how to do that ourselves," he said.

Fathom's Santa Barbara argues services like Amazon's SimpleDB, Apache CouchDB and even Microsoft's early attempt at SQL Data Services require too much development. "I think it's a mistake to try to abandon all the lessons we learned about how we got to relational databases," he said.

The company has not announced pricing other than to say it will be usage-based, allowing small companies to scale based on growth. It's also looking at providing fee-based reporting services in the future, Santa Barbara said.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Compare New GitHub Copilot Free Plan for Visual Studio/VS Code to Paid Plans

    The free plan restricts the number of completions, chat requests and access to AI models, being suitable for occasional users and small projects.

  • Diving Deep into .NET MAUI

    Ever since someone figured out that fiddling bits results in source code, developers have sought one codebase for all types of apps on all platforms, with Microsoft's latest attempt to further that effort being .NET MAUI.

  • Copilot AI Boosts Abound in New VS Code v1.96

    Microsoft improved on its new "Copilot Edit" functionality in the latest release of Visual Studio Code, v1.96, its open-source based code editor that has become the most popular in the world according to many surveys.

  • AdaBoost Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the AdaBoost.R2 algorithm for regression problems (where the goal is to predict a single numeric value). The implementation follows the original source research paper closely, so you can use it as a guide for customization for specific scenarios.

  • Versioning and Documenting ASP.NET Core Services

    Building an API with ASP.NET Core is only half the job. If your API is going to live more than one release cycle, you're going to need to version it. If you have other people building clients for it, you're going to need to document it.

Subscribe on YouTube