At CloudExpo 2012 in NY, I spoke to Jim Mlodgenski, CEO and founder of StormDB, about his unique approach to Database-As-A-Service offering. From the website:
StormDB is a fully managed relational database service that provides reliable performance with seamless scalability. Unlike typical cloud databases, StormDB takes a different approach to storing your data in the cloud. Instead of running a database inside of a virtual machine, losing performance and reliability, StormDB is a Database Cloud. Like similar Storage Clouds, there is no virtualization. Everything is running directly on bare metal giving you performance, scalability, and reliability.
A typical cloud database is limited by scaling up to the size of the virtual instance it uses, but StormDB automatically shards data across a cluster of servers specifically tuned for the unique requirements of a database. There is no need to setup complex replication solutions or give up the consistency of your data to scale your database in the cloud. By sharding data across the StormDB Cloud, queries can also leverage the power of massively parallel processing (MPP) and return the results of complex queries across large datasets in a fraction of the time of the typical cloud database.
(Please visit the site to view this video)