EnterpriseDB Betas SaaS Offer With Amazon and Elastra

EnterpriseDB, an ISV that offers an Oracle-compatible database at a fraction of the cost by basing it on the PostgreSQL open source database, has announced to beta test a SaaS offering with Amazon and Elastra, whose technology enables relational databases to run as an on-demand service.

Bob Zurek, CTO at Edison, New Jersey-based EnterpriseDB, said he joined the company in July and immediately began looking at the SaaS technologies, including Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for processing, and Simple Storage Service (S3) for storing data.

He was then introduced by a VC to Elastra, a San Francisco, California-based start-up that he said has “middleware to do clustering and elasticity, which means the capability of provisioning new instances of our server on the fly, as a customer requires it.”

Using Amazon EC2 and S3 as its infrastructure and the Elastra Elastic Database Technology as its middleware, the EnterpriseDB Advanced Server will now run in what the company calls “a virtual, highly scalable cloud-computing environment”, with the beta program actually starting in March.

Zurek said a wide range of company types have signed up for the program, but the target customer for the service is “Web 2.0, social networking companies, and ISVs like NetSuire and SugarCRM.” He said it is too early to say exactly how the service will be charged, but a per-GB fee is clearly a distinct possibility.

He said organizations currently running Oracle databases are the natural constituency for EnterpriseDB, but “if companies are currently using MySQL or SQL Server and want to move into a cloud-computing environment, we have the tools to enable that migration, as well as the replication technology to go back inside the firewall.”