That could mean not only startups, but also companies that may be running large portfolios of Web applications that don't necessarily get bombarded with traffic. "To have a $200-per-month database on all of those might not be economically feasible," he said.

Salesforce.com , a move that built on its own homegrown Force.com development platform. Heroku gave Salesforce.com entry to the many Ruby language developers that reflect Heroku's roots, but the service also now offers support for applications written in Java and Python.

That year, Salesforce.com Database.com, a pay-as-you-go service based on Force.com's underlying data store, which in part uses Oracle's database platform.

The IDG News Service