“The Cloud” is probably the biggest IT buzzword in 2011. It may as well be as meaningless and as short-lived as its predecessors “web 2.0” and “dotcom”, but clearly, the big companies are aiming for “The Cloud” right now. After Microsoft’s all-out marketing campaign for Windows Azure and its sub-product SQL Azure, there is now a comparable Google offensive on Google Labs:
https://code.google.com/apis/sql/docs/developers_guide_java.html
OK, marketing-wise, the term “offensive” is way over the top: Google Labs products often look quite geeky and by far less professional than those by Microsoft. But the approach is interesting, especially the choice of using MySQL as a SQL platform in the cloud. NoSQL was a response to traditional SQL’s inability to scale horizontally. If you buy a big box for your Oracle database, you’ll add memory and CPU power to make it scale vertically as your application grows. You’ll fine-tune your SQL, preferably with jOOQ ;-), to prevent performance bottlenecks in single queries. You’ll pay expensive DBA’s for the job.
When SQL goes to the cloud, however, horizontal scaling might become more realistic… I’m very curious to see where this goes. Clearly, jOOQ should be one of the first Java database abstraction tools to fully support Google Cloud SQL as well as SQL Azure.