DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services » Elastra

Elastra sinks into the dead pool

Curt Monash — Sat, 07 May 2011 02:01:27 +0000

Elastra is an ex-company. I’m not surprised, except by the fact that it took so long.

Some Elastra numbers

Curt Monash — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:59:34 +0000

GigaOm reports that Elastra just raised $12 million, and that it has 40 paying customers, up from 13 around the time of Elastra’s March launch.

Elastra launched today

Curt Monash — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:48:42 +0000

At Elastra’s request, I didn’t write further about them back when I was interested in doing so. But you can go find out about them yourself. Basically, their secret sauce is that they write deployment instructions in a few hundred lines of two proprietary markup languages. They have ambitions beyond DBMS, and beyond the Amazon cloud.

According to their slides, they have 13 paying customers.

EnterpriseDB on Elastra, early stages

Curt Monash — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:22:01 +0000

I finally caught up with Bob Zurek about EnterpriseDB’s foray into the Elastra cloud. Here are some highlights:

There have been dozens of applicants for the EnterpriseDB/Elastra beta program. As is usual in limited beta programs, EnterpriseDB is trying to sort out the ones who’ll make a big commitment from the tire-kickers.
The main interest in EnterpriseDB/Elastra has come from ISVs, and secondarily from purely online businesses (e.g., SaaS vendors, web businesses, and a large MMO game vendor). There’s been a little interest from enterprises.
Significant fractions of the EnterpriseDB/Elastra beta applications come from each of the Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL user communities. A few come from SQL Server. None come from DB2.
Bob praised Elastra for its technology in clustering, starting/stopping instances, etc. He also said that EnterpriseDB had “educated” Elastra on EnterpriseDB internals and/or admin tools, to make the integration work.
EnterpriseDB will start turning on a few beta Elastra customers any day now (i.e., it may well not take until March, the original target).

EnterpriseDB joins Elastra in the Amazon cloud

Curt Monash — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:38:26 +0000

When Elastra announced their service to host MySQL and PostgreSQL in the Amazon S3/EC2 cloud, I immediately told my dear darling clients at EnterpriseDB they should do the same. Whereupon they told me it would happen soon. However, they neglected to tell me when it was actually announced. So I know no more than can be found in this Computerworld article.

But I’ll say this — it’s a very tempting option, both for new web-based applications or businesses, or simply as a development platform pending later redeployment.

Elastra – somewhat more sensible Amazon-based DBMS option

Curt Monash — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 09:17:42 +0000

Elastra is a startup offering MySQL and PostgreSQL SaaS instances in the Amazon S3/EC2 cloud. On their board is John Hummer, which I generally regard as a good thing, although it’s hardly a guarantee of success.* High Scalability raises some doubts about Elastra’s pricing, but I think that may be missing the point.

*John’s track record includes Powersoft, Octel, and Employease — but also Pets.com, Napster, a company that gave me a ridiculous briefing, and a .524% career NBA free-throw percentage.

In a post earlier tonight about Amazon’s new SimpleDB, I suggested that SimpleDB’s main use might be as the database engine behind other S3/EC2 apps. In such scenarios, you don’t necessarily need a big or high-volume database; you just need one that works occasionally to accept orders and so on. On the other hand, you probably do want transaction integrity and other platform features that have been standard since at least the Reagan Administration. And in cases like that, Elastra’s service might not be too costly.

Of course, the same reasoning suggests that there might be trouble finding a hugely rewarding revenue model for it, but that’s not a big user concern. If the worst thing that happens to you is that your SaaS provider fizzles and you eventually have to find another way to host MySQL or PostgreSQL online, you should be fine …