John Musser, August 27th, 2007 Comments(1)

Back in May we reported on Astoria, Microsoft’s promising data services API designed to enable database programming “in the cloud” using a REST-style model. At the time you could only use their read-only examples but now you can create your own read-write database with it. Astoria program manager Mike Flasko announced this next piece of the Astoria service on their blog:

Web developers can create custom structured data stores (up to 100MB in size) on the web and access them from anywhere that they have Internet access. These data services can then be the storage or data source for mashups, or the backing store for Internet enabled applications, or be applied to any other scenario where a rich data service on the web is required, independently of where it is hosted.

This type of web-based database service has plenty of potential and it will be very interesting to see how this one evolves. [via]