Ouch. This pricing is pretty rough for SaaS sold on the premise of cloud scalability.
At $200/month for the entry level, their lowest price is many times what the cheapest geo-replicated "SQL engine as a service" from Google or Microsoft is. I'm not sure how the performance differs, but I am guessing theirs are no slouches.
Microsoft offers "SQL Database" geo-replicated for as low as $15/mo., and it scales up from there. Not sure about performance, but it would be apples to oranges (MySQL versus SQL Server) and difficult to compare. I wonder what the TPC numbers are, but apparently the TPC organization doesn't allow publishing that yet.
Google offers "Google Cloud SQL", also geo-replicated, and their cheapest pricing is between $10 and $18 dollars a month.
I don't think this is targeted towards those who only need to store a small amount of data and have very low performance needs. If you are are already spending $500/mo on an RDS instance, then it sounds like this would be a great solution. If you are spending $10/mo on a micro instance for your database server, I don't think this is targeted towards you.
It's not SQL Server, it's SQL Database. There are many large differences between the two.
A 50GB database with 10GB of RAM usage and 2 cores costs 700USD/Mo with SQL Database. This is replicated twice within DC. Double that price if you want georedundancy. Their entry level costs less but is also unusable for most real applications
At $200/month for the entry level, their lowest price is many times what the cheapest geo-replicated "SQL engine as a service" from Google or Microsoft is. I'm not sure how the performance differs, but I am guessing theirs are no slouches.
Microsoft offers "SQL Database" geo-replicated for as low as $15/mo., and it scales up from there. Not sure about performance, but it would be apples to oranges (MySQL versus SQL Server) and difficult to compare. I wonder what the TPC numbers are, but apparently the TPC organization doesn't allow publishing that yet.
Google offers "Google Cloud SQL", also geo-replicated, and their cheapest pricing is between $10 and $18 dollars a month.