Speaking at a TechCrunch's "Whose Cloud is it Anyway?" roundtable event in Mountain View, Calif., on Friday afternoon, Justin Santa Barbara, CEO of , revealed the company's intentions.
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"We're launching today as the only player offering standard relational databases in the cloud. We're the easiest way to run your database," Santa Barbara said.
"FathomDB gives you a worry-free database," he stressed. Featuring a pay-as-you-go model, the Web-based service requires no application changes and no lock-in, Santa Barbara said. It is based in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and leverages the MySQL database, he said.
Low-level database tasks are tended to by FathomDB, and data safety is provided, said Santa Barbara. Analytics are offered to show what is happening in a customer's database, he said. Additional services are planned, such as reporting.
Open registration for beta began today, with general availability anticipated in a couple of months, Santa Barbara said. He encouraged attendees at the event to "sign up today and leave the database to us."
Microsoft also has big plans for cloud-based database services, readying its , which will be based on the company's SQL Server database and run on the .
TechCrunch held its event at Microsoft's Silicon Valley offices.