Amazon offers MySQL database on demand

Amazon has added to its cloud storage offerings with a Relational Database Service (RDS).

Amazon RDS is still in beta, but has been described by commentators as more sophisticated than the firm's other database offering, SimpleDB.

Amazon RDS is based on Sun Microsystems' flagship MySQL open-source software, and will offer customers the same capabilities as MySQL but in a cloud environment, the firm said.

"You get direct database access without worrying about infrastructure provisioning, software maintenance or common database management tasks," Amazon said in a blog post.

"You can scale the processing power and storage space as needed with a single API call, and you can initiate fully consistent database snapshots at any time. Much of what you already know about building applications with MySQL will still apply. Your code and your queries will work as expected."

Customers will be able to specify how much server memory they need depending on the size of the database they want to run. They can choose from five different classes of server, and will pay a corresponding hourly rate, as with Amazon cloud services.

An additional charge of US$0.10 cents per gigabyte per month applies for provisioned storage and US$0.10 cents for every million I/O requests.

Amazon said that the service will allow businesses to set up a separate database instance for each developer on a project without making a big investment in hardware.