Ask HN: Outsourced SQL Providers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Outsourced SQL Providers?

3 pointsSamAtt6 comments

Hi everyone,

I've been asked by my boss to explore the option of outsourcing part of our data to an external SQL provider. So I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations as far as companies they’ve worked with.

Our primary concern here is uptime and we’re willing to pay a decent amount for it (e.g. a $20 shared hosting solution is not what we’re looking for)

Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Sam

P.S. One thing I forgot to say. It has to be either MS-SQL or MySQL. We don't want to use something like Amazon SimpleDB because this experiment in outsourcing might fail and we want to be able to bring that data back to a local server.

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Have you thought about the latency increase inherent in moving your database across the city or state or country? You may be surprised by how large an impact this can have on overall application performance.

YC company FathomDB (http://fathomdb.com) set off on this path and have/had some interesting ideas about caching and such. I think they settled down to specifically providing service to EC2 users, so they could insure nearness and low-latency. The latency problem is an extremely difficult one to solve. I believe there have been a couple of other YC companies chasing similar dragons. I don't know their names off-hand. But, databases are an obviously large market ripe for change, so there's going to be some money made there...and so there are probably dozens of companies laboring away on the problem as we speak.

Why are you looking to outsource? You might consider just outsourcing the backup and data retention, instead, since backups as a service is well-understood and has lots of providers.

We're looking at outsourcing a few of our non-secure applications because management is unpredictable. They will, without any warning, just decide they need to give x group of employees a computer and we'll have to add 20 computers to the network within the next week or so. Given that volatility we need to be able to scale quickly on the server side. That's led us to EC2 but we need a database for all those instances to pull off of.

Oh, and thanks for the suggestion :)

Too bad you're not willing to consider PostgreSQL. I would have suggested http://www.commandprompt.com

I just hadn't thought of it. I'll give it a look. Thanks!

what type of data are you storing and what type of application is retrieving it? i would imagine the latency between your network and the sql provider's would hurt performance badly.

most web hosting providers can give you a sql database but in those instances it works well because your website is probably running on the same local network as their sql server.

We're doing this specifically to test but I don't see latency being a serious issue. The apps only pull text of about 1k at any given time and we have a 40Mbps connection so assuming we find a service in the U.S. I can't see it being a problem.

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