Yesterday Oracle announced a database-as-a-service offering and a Java platform-as-a-service as part of its Oracle Public Cloud, which is now in developer preview mode. Today Google announced its own DBaaS based on MySQL called Google Cloud SQL. As of now it appears to designed only to work with Google AppEngine, a PaaS from Google that support Java, Python and Google’s programming language Go.

While in preview the service is free, and Google promises to publish pricing at least 30 days before charging for it.

Here are the features as per the announcement:

• No maintenance or administration – we manage the database for you.
• High reliability and availability – your data is replicated synchronously to multiple data centers. Machine, rack and data center failures are handled automatically to minimize end-user impact.
• Familiar MySQL database environment with JDBC support (for Java-based App Engine applications) and DB-API support (for Python-based App Engine applications).
• Comprehensive user interface for administering databases.
• Simple and powerful integration with Google App Engine.

Services Angle

The lack of an integrated database service has been a limitation of App Engine for sometime, and the Cloud SQL announcement notes that it’s one of the most requested features. This feature will make App Engine more attractive to application developers, which previously had to rely on Google’s proprietary data stores based on its own BigTable technology.

Earlier today I was talking with our editor-in-chief Mark Hopkins about how MySQL is the performance bottleneck for most WordPress blogs and many other Web applications. That’s part of what’s driving companies like Salesforce.com (with its Database.com service), Oracle and Google to get into this market. At the moment this is only available for App Engine users, but it would be interesting to see this extended to other apps as well.