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div class="rxbodyfield"p page="1" class="ArticleBody"Zoho, maker of an on-demand suite of business
and productivity applications, announced on Tuesday CloudSQL, a new service that lets developers
use the ubiquitous SQL to connect Zoho data with other cloud-based or on-premises applications./pp
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width="336" height="280" border="0" alt="" align="right"//a/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"SQL is a
quot;pretty oldquot; language but is also quot;pretty awesome,quot; said Zoho#39;s director of
marketing, Rodrigo Vaca, in a a target="_blank" href="http://blogs.zoho.com/general/cloudsql/"blog
post/a Tuesday. quot;It is by far one of the easiest and most efficient ways to query and interact
with structured data. That#39;s why it remains by far one of the most heavily used languages for
business applications.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"b[ Discover the top-rated IT products as
rated by the a href="http://www.infoworld.com/testcenter/?source=fssr"InfoWorld Test Center/a.
]/b/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"a
href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/07/15FE-cloud-computing-reality_1.html"Cloud
computing/a #160;has ushered in new methods of data retrieval and storage, leading to
quot;improved, faster, and more responsive Web applications,quot; Vaca added. quot;But while there
are some SQL-like approaches for cloud computing out there, they tend to be fairly limited and not
as powerful as the full-blown SQL.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"CloudSQL supports a wide
range of SQL variants, including ANSI, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 and MySQL./pp page="1"
class="ArticleBody"The service quot;serves as the bridge between the external application and the
data stored inside Zoho. It receives the query in SQL, interprets it, delegates queries and
aggregates results across the Zoho services,quot; Vaca wrote./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The
company has also developed a JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) driver and is working on an ODBC
(Open Database Connectivity) driver. This means developers quot;can just continue using SQL drivers
and statements as they already regularly interact with their premises-based databases using JDBC or
ODBC drivers,quot; Zoho said in a statement./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Initially, Zoho
Reports, a BI and reporting service, will support CloudSQL. Other products, such as Zoho CRM, will
support it down the road./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Zoho#39;s announcement represents an
attempt to win over IT specialists who haven#39;t been quite ready to embrace the cloud-computing
model, one observer suggested Tuesday./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"quot;CloudSQL simply
represents an incremental move that will enable Zoho to grow, extending a comfort blanket to
nervous DBAs seeking reasons to resist relinquishing control over their data,quot; a
target="_blank"
href="http://cloudofdata.com/2008/12/zohos-cloudsql-another-step-toward-the-data-cloud/"wrote/a
Paul Miller, a blogger who tracks trends in cloud computing and the semantic Web./pp page="1"
class="ArticleBody"For now, CloudSQL is available at no cost. Zoho, which is a division of the
Pleasanton, California, company AdventNet, will monitor usage and decide whether it needs to begin
charging for it, according to a representative./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"CloudSQL is somewhat
unusual in that it lets users connect their Zoho apps and others in a free and broadly compatible
manner, instead of forcing them to use a proprietary tool that carries a price tag, said Redmonk
analyst Michael Cot#233;./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"quot;Access to data is the key problem for
all these [cloud-based applications],quot; he said. quot;That#39;s where the lock-in is, it seems,
in such offerings. Whoever controls access to the data can control pricing.quot;/p/divbr
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