EnterpriseDB plops Postgres on Amazon's 'cloud'

EnterpriseDB has ported its Oracle-compatible PostgreSQL database to a new platform: Amazon.com's hosted compute cloud.

The company on Tuesday started taking invitations for a beta program for EnterpriseDB Cloud Edition that will launch in March. The final product should be available this summer, according to EnterpriseDB Chief Technology Officer Bob Zurek, who spearheaded the initiative.

Amazon already offers a hosted database, called SimpleDB, but Zurek said that its database is designed for transactions and industrial-strength applications.

The service works with clustering software from Elastra, which means that servers and storage are quickly brought online to meet changes in computing demand, he explained. It taps into Amazon's Web services for hosted servers and storage, called Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

EnterpriseDB has not announced pricing, but the company is looking at usage models in which customers pay for use of the database by the hour or by the month.

Potential customers are either enterprises that have custom applications that run on EntrerpriseDB or Web 2.0 start-ups that only want to pay for computing power as needed, Zurek said. He said tests show that application performance over the Internet does not degrade substantially.

He argued that the offering will make EnterpriseDB more competitive against MySQL, the leading open-source database provider which is widely used by Web companies. MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems for $1 billion earlier this month.