Salesforce.com parks cloudy database over Ellison's head Larry Ellison's got a new database competitor in the form of Salesforce.com, with the launch of Database.com from his one-time protégé Marc Benioff. Salesforce.com is going head-to-head against Oracle, as Benioff plans today to unveil his new venture. It's a relational database in the sky, delivered as a service and sold via …
Currently, if your internet connection goes down, your users can't update their Facebook statuses.
If I've understood this new product correctly, now your database will be halfway across the world from your applications, so if your internet connection goes slow or goes down, all your applications grind to a halt. Strange, I've always been taught to keep the database as close to your apps as possible.
Surely I've misunderstood something...
Try to explain that to some dumb, stupid mba, who sees the `cloud` as the end to all of `our IT problems`, and a way to save money in the process.
The only reason why our 700+ employee company did not go down that rocky road is because IT had the presence to `gang up` on that stupid mba and ream him a new one.
Once we started asking some really pointed questions, and he could not come up with the answers, did the question of `should we move to the cloud` got shot down.
After the meeting, It strongly suggested that he not take the stairs any more, as he might end up having `an accident`.. God,do we have some real BOFH's around here. I was hoping that he would be tasked with checking the primary electrical transformer. 12KV does tend to throw off some sparks when you get too close.
So the question is thus what database engine are Salesforce actually using to run this? I thought it was fairly common knowledge that it's currently Oracle anyway.
Regarding the actual service - they have a long way to go before they have a database that is useful for all activities you need to do. For example I replicate lots of Salesforce.com instances to SQL Server so that we can do ad-hoc joins and aggregates across the whole dataset. This isn't possible on SOQL.
A good example is show me all Accounts joined to leads on a semi-normalised phone number? A query you may want to run to see leads which are from existing customers.
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