CloudBzz has a little intro to SQL In the Cloud, and with that they mean the public cloud. Good overview of existing offerings, and the suggestion that
Cloud-based DBaaS options will continue to grow in importance and will eventually become the dominant model. Cloud vendors will have to invest in solutions that enable horizontal scaling and self-healing architectures to address the needs of their bigger customers
I can only agree. What I wonder, though, is how much these DBaaS is based on traditional RDBMS such as MySQL, and what kind of changes we’ll eventually see to better support the elasticity requirements of cloud DBs. E.g. I hear anecdotically that in SQL Azure, every cloud DB is just a table in the underlying SQL Server infrastructure (see also Inside SQL Azure), and the good folks at Xeround are also investing heavily in their Virtual Partitioning scheme.