FAQ
OVERVIEW QUESTIONS
What is Database.com?
Database.com is the cloud database that integrates Salesforce.com's Social Enterprise Platform. Whether you are building employee facing apps with Force.com, or customer facing apps with Heroku, Database.com is the cloud database that makes it easy to securely share data across multiple channels, build collaboration into every app, and connect employees and customers everywhere with mobile applications.
What are the benefits of Database.com?
Database.com is:
- Open: Database.com’s advanced APIs make it a great platform for building enterprise data services that can be consumed from any language, platform, or device.
- Mobile: Custom REST APIs, data feeds, and integrated Identity and Access Management, make it easy to build mobile applications without having to worry about infrastructure.
- Social: Database.com’s Access Management and Chatter REST APIs help to ensure that you can get the right data, to the right people, at the right time while providing a collaboration framework based on concepts that have been proven effective within the world’s most popular consumer social networking applications
- Trusted: Database.com powers over 104,000 businesses running more than 250,000 applications every day and is proven to be secure, reliable and fast.
What functionality is included in Database.com?
- A database
- Relational data store
- Support for many data types
- Query language
- Enterprise search services
- File storage
- Documents, Video, Images
- Integration of file storage into relational data structures
- Business logic
- Declarative triggers
- Programmatic, transactional triggers and stored procedures
- Identity and Access management
- Identity/profiles, Authentication, oAuth & SAML support
- Permissions
- Row-level security: Security model that provides data access rules down to the row level that are enforced with every API call
- Data APIs
- Auto-generated data CRUD
- Bulk APIs for importing/exported large amounts of data
- Streaming APIs for real-time pub/sub
- Custom APIs to aggregate and host complex, transactional logic
- Metadata APIs
- Access to all of your customizations for enable application life-cycle management
- Social APIs
- Social profiles
- Groups
- Subscriptions
- Social graph
- Comments
- Data feeds
- Tools
- Database administration console
- Developer IDE
- Developer tool kits (see details below)
- Automatic Administration
- Auto elasticity
- Auto backups
- Auto tuning and indexing
- Auto upgrades
- Auto replication to remote data centers
- Creation of dev, test and training sandboxes with the push of a button
What is the pricing for Database.com?
Database.com will be free to get started. Basic Database.com services, including database access, file storage and automatic administration, will be available beginning at:
- Free for 3 Standard Users, 3 Admin Users, up to 100,000 records and 50,000 transactions/month
- $10/month for each set of 100,000 records beyond that
- $10/month for each set of 150,000 transactions beyond that
- $10/month for each Standard User beyond that
- $10/month for 100 Light Users
See Database.com Pricing for more details.
What is a transaction?
A transaction is an API call to the database.
What is a user?
There are two types of end-users in Database.com: Standard Users and Light Users. By leveraging Database.com users, developers get access to a number of using security and collaboration capabilities that they would otherwise have to code themselves.
Standard Users include:
- identity & user management
- authentication
- user profiles and permissions
- object sharing defaults - public, private, read-only
- sharing rules - business rules that define row-level filtering logic
- enterprise search: search results are filtered by data security rules
- social data model & social APIs
Light Users include:
- identity & user management
- authentication
- user profiles and permissions
- object sharing defaults: public, private, read-only
- social data model & social APIs
See Force.com and Database.com for a list of differences between the products. See Understanding Database.com System and Data Access Controls for more information about the Database.com security model.
What are the top use cases for Database.com?
Database.com is built for social and mobile enterprise apps. For example, customers can build anything from inventory management, recruiting and order entry apps that are mobile and provide social collaboration capabilities built-in. Customers can use Database.com to power their native mobile apps that allow employees, partners, and customers to share and collaborate.
What type of architectures will customers use to build these apps?
Users expect to access their data whether they are at home, in the office, or on the road from their laptop, tablet, or mobile phone. This is leading to more distributed, multi-channel architectures where applications running on different platforms access the same data service to present a consistent view of that data regardless of the delivery channel.
Database.com is an ideal platform for building these enterprise data services with central security configuration and enforcement and advanced capabilities for securely exposing custom APIs over the Internet. Developers can access these services from any language, running on any platform or device. Typical use cases would be social & mobile enterprise applications running on a cloud platform or native mobile apps on a mobile device.
The application can be written in any language: Java, C#, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Objective C and others. They can run anywhere - on Force.com, Heroku, Amazon EC2, Google AppEngine, or Microsoft Azure. They can run natively on any device, like an iPad, an iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc.
TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS
What’s the value of this row-level security capability of Database.com?
- Rules are enforced automatically by the database for every query, freeing developers from having to code data security logic into each application they write against the database
- Declarative data security rules that are isolated and managed independently from the rest of your application business logic
- Graphical interface to define data security rules
- Rules can be assigned to users and groups of users (roles)
- Rules can be defined down to the row level (such as user 1 can access inventory data for products A-M and user 2 can access inventory data for products N-Z)
For more detail on Database.com’s security model, see Understanding Database.com System and Data Access Controls.
What developer toolkits can I use with Database.com?
See Database.com Tools for a list of tool kits that are available from salesforce.com & 3rd parties.
Do I need to use Database.com’s user model?
No. It's up to the developer.
The main benefits to Database.com’s user model is the ability to leverage the built-in security and collaboration features. If developers choose to use Database.com's identity and authentication system, they can simply pass user tokens through its API and Database.com will handle all of the authentication and security filtering logic freeing them from having to code this into their apps. This is particularly useful when the filtering logic is relatively complex and/or depends on an organization hierarchy. It is also quite useful to centralize security configuration and enforcement when the data needs to be access from multiple applications. For more detail on Database.com’s security model, see Understanding Database.com System and Data Access Controls.
In additional to security, Database.com’s user model is the basis for the Chatter REST API and framework. Chatter REST API gives you access to user profiles, groups, subscriptions to records and documents, social graph, and automatically generated data feeds while adhering to any security settings you have configured.
Alternatively, developers can also choose to manually code identity, authentication and data security logic, enterprise search, and collaboration into their applications themselves. Of course this is not a trivial task and more complex your security requirements are the more sensitive your data, the more reason to leverage Database.com’s proven model.
Is it secure? Can customers trust Database.com with sensitive corporate data?
Database.com is based on the same trusted and proven technology and service delivery infrastructure that has powered salesforce.com for the past 12 years. It includes the latest and most advanced security technologies for authentication, encryption and identity verification. It has been vetted by many of the largest governments, banks and health care providers in the world. It has been certified ISO 27001, SysTrust and SAS 70 Type II. Database.com also makes it easy to create rules that specify exactly what data each user or groups of users have access to - down to the individual record level. For more detail, see Understanding Database.com System and Data Access Controls and Database.com: Secure, Private, and Trustworthy.
Is there an upper limit to how much data can be stored in Database.com?
There is no fixed upper limit.
Is there an upper limit to how many users Database.com can support?
There is no fixed upper limit. We have customers with hundreds of thousands of users.
What about transactions, triggers, etc?
Database.com includes a native, transactional trigger and stored procedure language.
Does Database.com support SQL?
Database.com is optimized for the cloud and natively supports SOAP and REST APIs.
Developers who want to use ODBC or JDBC connections for standard SQL communication with Database.com can leverage drivers created by third parties in the Database.com ecosystem such as Progress Software.
PRICING AND AVAILABILITY
What is the international pricing?
Records, transactions and users prices per month: 12 AUD 10 Euro 1,000 JPY 8 GBP 85 SEK
When will it be available?
Database.com has already been made generally available as a standalone product. You can sign up for your free database now from the homepage.
How much does file storage cost? is this changing?
Please see Database.com Pricing.
FORCE.COM AND DATABASE.COM
What is the difference between Force.com and Database.com?
Force.com is an application development platform. Database.com is a database. They can be used together or separately.
What are the major differences of what you can do with Database.com and what you can do with Force.com?
Database.com provides database services only. All access to the database is programmatic through our APIs. Database.com does not include the Force.com development platform so there is no point-and-click application development, no automatically generated forms, no chatter UI, no reports/dashboard, no visualforce, no web sites, no email messaging and visual workflow. All user interfaces must be built by a developer using their development platform of choice.
How many transactions did Database.com do today?
The number of transactions is posted on the home page of Database.com. It is the cumulative number of transactions done by Database.com for all applications using it, including the Salesforce applications, as well as all of the custom applications and packaged ISV applications running on Force.com. System health, transactional volume and performance can always be seen at trust.database.com.
Are user interface components like page layouts, analytics (reports and dashboards), Visualforce, Workflow and VPM included?
No. They are all part of Force.com.
Is Salesforce Mobile included in Database.com?
No, Salesforce Mobile is part of Force.com. With Database.com you can build native apps for mobile devices using our tool kits and call the database through the API.
INDUSTRY
Can people port an existing database to Database.com?
Yes. Developers can migrate existing databases to Database.com by either writing migration scripts using our metadata APIs or through 3rd party migration tools. For example, Informatica Cloud offers a tool to automatically migrate on-premise database schemas and data to Database.com.
