Cloud/hosted database/datastore services to replace local SQL Server instance

As a .NET web developer, I've always used SQL Server as my database store because it's already in the MSFT ecosystem and easy to work with from the .NET platform.

Recently, however, I had a computer almost literally blow up, and consequently lost all my data in SQL Server on that machine.

Now that I've got a new computer, I want to start using an off-site database so that this doesn't happen again. A database hosted by a third-party (i.e. hosting company) or cloud service.

It doesn't have to be SQL Server or even RMDBS necessarily, but if it's not, it'd be be something cutting-edge (e.g. redis, Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, etc.) and not just MySQL or Postgre or something.

Does anyone have an recommendations for those with little financial means?

I'd 开发者_Python百科like to be able to use it during development of projects, and if they ever go live, not have to migrate the data anywhere to a new service--keep the data right there where it is and point my live domain requiring the data to the same service it pointed while in development.

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It's not so much a question of available hosted services as of what setup you want for your standard development environment. If one of the cloud datastores doesn't work for you, you can always get a virtual server and install whatever you need.

However, you may want to rethink the idea of putting dev databases in the cloud. Performance will not be as good as something running locally (particularly if you are working with things like bulk import), and turning a dev database into a production database isn't a particularly good idea. I think what you are really looking for is a combination of easy backup, schema management and data setup.

Backup on a live server is easy enough - either you are backing up the entire server or have a script that uploads the backup file somewhere. For dev I don't bother as I prefer to set up disposable environments - have code that can set up the database if it doesn't already exist and add any necessary default data. Most apps don't need much data unless there is some sort of import process involved, and the same code works quite nicely when you first set up the live environment.

Schema management is one of the more painful aspects of working with SQL and where NoSQL systems can make life a lot easier as most have the schema defined entirely by the code that is using it - I mostly use redis myself, but whether or not it is appropriate for you will depend on the type of project you work on - if you need a lot of joins or transactions you probably need SQL, but if you just need basic data storage most NoSQL platforms would be better.

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May I suggest looking into Windows Azure table storage? It is quiet different from pure relational play of SQL Server, is the "next big thing" from Microsoft and is in general a somewhat of a paradigm shift for folks used to relational databases.

If you're ever going to come face to face with Azure in the future (and I suspect many .NET people will), it maybe a beneficial of an experience to have.

With respect to costs, they're negligible for individual use. 10,000 transactions a month cost a penny. A gigabyte per month of storage costs 15 cents, and data transfers are 10-15cents per gigabyte.

If you have only "development" projects that store their data in the cloud, I'll be damned if you pay more than $2-3/month to MS... if that :)

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Google Cloud Datastore is in beta now and could be a good option for you. It's free up to 1GB and 50K requests per day. The API is rather low level. However, I wrote a high level ORM for GCD called Pogo that serializes and deserializes plain old objects into GCD entities.

Take a look at the documentation and open source here - http://code.thecodeprose.com/pogo

It's also available on Nuget called "Pogo".