Google gives cloud-based database a performance boost

IDG News Service - Google's Cloud SQL database has gained more storage, faster reads and writes, and now offers users the choice of running their instances in data centers based in either the U.S. or Europe.

The performance upgrade allows enterprises to run bigger, faster MySQL databases on Google's cloud, Joe Faith, product manager for Google Cloud SQL, wrote in a blog post on Thursday.

Faith and his team have increased the available storage on Cloud SQL by a factor of ten to 100 GB, according to the blog post. Faster reads and writes are also possible thanks to instances with more memory and optional asynchronous replication, it said.

The maximum amount of RAM is now 16GB, quadrupling the amount of data users can cache to increase read speeds.

Asynchronous replication results in faster writes to the database, because the system doesn't have to wait for the replication to finish. However, users might lose their latest updates in the event of a data center failure within a few seconds of updating the database, according to Google's FAQ.

Besides improving performance, Google now allows Premier customers to choose if they want to store data and run their Cloud SQL database instances in U.S or European data centers.

Google's update comes just two days after Amazon Web Services announced two new instance types for its Relational Database Service: the Extra Large DB Instance and the Medium DB Instance, which have 15GB and 3.75GB of memory, respectively. Both of them can be used to run SQL Server and Oracle's database, while the medium instance can also be used to run MySQL.

Amazon has also reduced prices by up to 14% in the US East (Northern Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions.

For example, a standard deployment of a large instance now costs $0.365 per hour, which is 5 cents cheaper than what Amazon used to charge.

Similar to Amazon's existing free tier, Google has introduced a new trial offer for Cloud SQL. Users get to test one instance with "a small amount of RAM" and 500MB of storage until June 1 next year.

Users who want Cloud SQL with 16GB of memory pay either $46.84 per day, which includes 10GB of storage and 32 million requests, or $3.08 per hour plus $0.10 for every one million requests and $0.24 per month for 1GB of storage.

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