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Today Salesforce.com announced a new technology that should make IT pause before writing another big check to Oracle. Database.com is another reason to look at the Force.com platform as an alternative to in-house development, a private cloud or other cloud offerings.
Salesforce.com has had a few years to firm up Force.com and it now offers a robust PaaS option that includes a cloud-based language for logic and data access (APEX), and a cloud based language for user interfaces (VisualForce). Both are very similar to Java, are easy to learn, and take advantage of unique elements of the Force.com platform (flexible data model, security, scalability). In order to bolster adoption, they announced VMForce earlier this year in conjunction with VMWare as an attempt to add the millions of Java developers to the Force.com fold by supporting the Spring framework and Java code natively on the platform.
The announcement of database.com opens yet another door for IT to add Force.com to their platform toolkit. Essentially, database.com allows a developer in any language (Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, etc.) to use Force.com as their back-end instead of their own database or another database-as-a-service option.
Salesforce.com was astute in how they developed this new offering by creating a user interface and an approach that assumes no knowledge of Force.com or Salesforce. The browser-based interface allows a developer to easily create tables (objects), relationships, stored procedures (triggers), and perform queries. This is a very low barrier to entry for any developer and gives them a powerful database platform to start using while removing the need for a DBA. Database.com takes care of the tuning, indexing and even back-ups of the data, allowing developers to focus on application development.
I’m personally excited about the announcement today and believe that database.com will be a viable offering that will give IT departments a strong alternative when they are looking at database options. I predict this will open up the back-end of Force.com to new developers, and that a variety of applications written in several different languages will utilize it as an easy, yet powerful back-end. This approach will allow Force.com to more easily play in the hybrid cloud architecture of the future where a front-end could be hosted internally in a private cloud, or on another public cloud such as AWS and the back-end could be on Force.com.