The use of databases within enterprises

Cloud computing is set to transform the use of databases within enterprises. According to a Database Trends Survey, more than a third of database professionals think that cloud computing is to have the most transformational effect on database innovation. Thirty four of respondents to the survey plumped for cloud as the innovation that would have most effect on their lives, ahead of the 27 percent who chose virtualisation.

This is the sort of concern that will fuel adoption of cloud computing said Scott Walz, senior director of product management for Embarcadero. "One goal is to move some of the tasks that the DBA is by and large responsible for(patch management, storage optimisation, etc) to the cloud and, by default, to the cloud vendor. As a DBA, the goal truly is to have fewer database-related emergencies, as there will be service level agreements, as the companies will be paying for this service he said.

"With cloud database offerings from Amazon and Microsoft and a slew of open source providers taking off, most database professionals will be involved with the innovation in some form in 2011," said Walz. He said that this will lead to changes in the way that company was developing its own tools. "Quite a few of the tools in the marketplace are making the necessary changes to include cloud support. In our conversations with clients, we're finding that quite a few of them plan to keep the development and testing databases in-house, during only moving the production database to the cloud. So, it's imperative for them to have tools that seamlessly connect to both the local instance and the cloud.