Startups looking for a database back end will soon have more options (hopefully). MySQL is a fantastic lightweight database that scales reasonably well for most projects. Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and other commercial offerings scale well and have lots of great support but at a massive cost, creating a barrier to entry for most providers. Last year, Amazon announced their solution, a database in the cloud (my thoughts). Not to be outdone, Google is rumored to be announcing their own online equivillent tonight at one of their campfire format press events. They used Campfire One to announce OpenSocial and Tech Crunch is rumoring that they may be announcing their cloud database platform BigTable. With this, small businesses will be able to better outsource database (and database management) with minimal costs and potentially unlimited scale. This is ideal as the amount of user generated, tags, index, and categorized content online continues to grow. Many companies are having great success using Amazon’s Web Services for storage and computational intensive projects. This is a natural extension to that.