[barrybhunter]

Yes that's the sort of thing. But ideally that should be available without signing up. To get an idea of what is possible - ie is it worth even bothering to signup.

Like I had no idea if supported geo-queries, and/or full-text queries. (seems not?)

To know how compare to competition :)

[jnesbitt]

At the moment we only support what's documented in the SBQL docs, but we're open to any suggestions you have. Other features can be implemented as add-ons, if the demand is strong enough. Note taken about the docs only being available after signing in. Thanks for your feedback!

[barrybhunter]

The problem I have with these sort of services (and its nothing specific to signalbox) - is seem to be aiming at the wrong market. Need to think bigger.

For something like 100,000 records - in general a pretty standard instance of mysql can cope just fine. A lot of the time the database you get free with shared hosting, can cope with queries on this sort of size database just fine (as long as they have indexes). (Or the free database you get with heroku)

... true yes you have to do a bit more sysadmin tasks - maybe even backups etc. But all very doable.

As a beginner at sysadmin tasks, I start to struggle with mid-size datasets. A couple of million records. This is when backups begin getting a pain. Query optimization is actully required. Things start getting painful. full-text search is non trivial. geo-indexes are cumbersome.

But its harder finding a database provider for this sort of size. getsignalbox's doesn't even consider this possibility (other than the 'get in touch') - it might well be able to cater. But talking at $200+ a month, which starts to get serious. + this sort of mid size is where the cloud could excel, where sysadmin tasks start to get non-trivial.

Another thing missing - is a simple bulk upload - to be able to import a midsized dataset to be able to try out the service. Even if that is a 200Mb CSV file :)

IMHO of course! (Or I need to think smaller ;)

[funkingburty]

Thanks for your comments.

Our service isn't aiming to be a cloud platform like Heroku nor a database like Amazon SimpleDB. Our aim is to help client developers by removing the need for bespoke server and database for each and every project. API development often involves a lot of repetition. We aim to remove some of that repetition so that developers can concentrate on creating a rich experience for their users. We're all about everyday widgets, mobile apps and rich JavaScript sites.

We've got a lot of features around the corner including a user management engine, powerful add-ons, data import/export and so on. It's early days for us. We're building the product we want to use, and hope others will too.

[JohnTitus]

Are there other companies that do this sort of thing?

[kevinpfab]

Just to name a couple similar companies off the top of my head:

http://parse.com

http://kinvey.com

http://cloudmine.me

http://proxomo.com

[barrybhunter]

A few more: http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ http://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/ https://developers.google.com/fusiontables/

There are plenty more 'databases' in the cloud. Even ones just providing say a generic mysql instance, with a HTTP interface.