Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff has announced a new platform launching next year, named Database.com, that will offer developers a scalable, multi-tenant database for use with any type of programming language.
Database.com will make use of existing internal Salesforce software that runs the databases behind its sites. The service will be free for users with fewer than 50,000 transactions a month and fewer than 100,000 records stored. For US$10 per month, developers will be able to add 100,000 records, or 150,000 transactions. Enterprises will have additional access to search, security and authentication services at a rate of $10 per user per month.
Eric Stahl, senior director of product marketing at Salesforce, said that the Database.com service will also be focused on mobile developers. “We’re talking about next-generation social and mobile applications, too. The real magic happens deep down in the database,” he said.
“We’re looking at the use case where these applications are mobile and developers want to write the applications natively on an iPhone or Android or BlackBerry. Those applications need to be able to call a database over the Internet in a secure way. We’ve been looking at how we can make that possible.”
To that end, the Salesforce team is aiming for a completely hands-off database administration system. Scaling up of data and caching commonly used information will happen automatically within Database.com. Developers will not have to worry about optimizing their databases, either, as the service will also take care of this automatically.
Database.com will be available for use with both a REST and SOAP API.
