george 86905 (5/9/2012)
First of all, I love this site, and therefore, by extension, I love Steve Jones, I suppose. You guys have saved me many hours of deadends and the hours some of you spend on editing your posts and example code is amazing.
Thanks, and glad we could help you.
I have to say this post really does read like marketing copy and to my mind that makes the poster pretty much a shill. I wonder if I'm going to see Amazon RDS banner ads on my Google search pages now? This press release-like post does not note a single negative aspect of Amazon's new product--and if course it is just another product. One would think that an actual informative post might also mention the costs or at least provide a link to a menu of cost options.
It's an opinion piece. I like the idea of the service and highlighted those things that I see. I think I wrote "There are a few restrictions at the instance level since you don't have access to the underlying host OS". My intention was not to provide a complete review of the service, but talk about what it does.
Cost wasn't finalized when I wrote this, so I left it out. It is up now: http://aws.amazon.com/rds/#pricing
Not trying to be totally negative without offering an alternative. What about this? Now that this 'news' is out there, what about an objective product comparision showing the other main players in this space and how they all rank along the most important decision vectors?
Not a bad idea. Though hard to compare services that aren't the same. SQL Azure doesn't offer SQL Server 2008 R2 or SQL Server 2012. It's some weird hybrid superset/subset combination. We could compare EC2 and a few other providers that let you see costs and capacities. I'll look into it, but it's challenging as the costs and services are evolving so rapidly.