So, what’s new?  A tenfold increase in the available storage on Cloud SQL, according Faith, from 10GB to 100GB.  Moreover, faster reads and writes when leveraging instances with more memory and optional asynchronous replication.   Indeed the maximum amount of RAM is now 16GB, four times the amount of data users can currently cache, to increase speed.

By leveraging the new asynchronous replication feature, the result is faster writes to the database.  This is because the system doesn’t have to wait for the replication to complete.

There is clearly a race to the top in terms of who’s going to offer the best database features in the cloud.  Count on Amazon Web Services to drive forward with new features for their SQL and no-SQL database offerings, then Microsoft, then back to Google…you get the idea.

The winner in all this one-upmanship is the enterprise IT that has the guts to move to this technology now.  I find the ability to leverage cloud-based database technology is clearly the quickest path to cloud ROI.

The way that most enterprises manage their database assets is typically outdated, and has yet to provide scalable access to the most valuable business data.  The emerging cloud-based database engines are not only promising, but should be considered in today’s technology mix as we move to get our enterprise data assets under control.  In other words, the stuff works, it’s very good, it’s cheap, let’s take advantage.