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Distributed database TransLattice has a dream of scalable multi-cloud data for all, but competition among providers may quash it.

With the release of the TransLattice Elastic Database (TED) 3.0 on Monday, the company is trumpeting its ability to run across multiple public clouds.

TransLattice has accounts on both clouds, and at the request of a user can spin up new resources "in about 20 minutes," the company's CTO Mike Lyle told The Register. If a customer already has an account with either cloud, they can manually add in IPs of new nodes wherever they are.

"Our customers can turn on resources on top of multiple public clouds and when they do so they are incorporated into a common database cluster that then they can [use to] write common policy rules," Lyle said.

Why not launch with compatibility for Google Compute Engine, Windows Azure, and the Oracle Public Cloud as well?

"We're directly competitive with Microsoft – Microsoft has SQL server – that has made it a bit more of a challenge to work with them," TransLattice CTO Mike Lyle told us. "Oracle and Microsoft, yeah, you can probably cross those two off the [compatibility] list."

By that logic, El Reg thinks Google can be struck off as well, as TransLattice is built around the same idea as Mountain View's Spanner system, and Google is not famous for partnering on technology.

So what does the multi-cloud capability give a company, aside from a bit of extra redundancy?

For one thing, the company can apply detailed policy controls. New features in TED 3.0 allow policy setting that lets companies control not only where the data is located, but to where it can be replicated and to where it cannot ever go.

For example, this means an organization could use Amazon for most of their data, but hive a portion to be kept within Dell data centers in a completely different geographic region. [If you have to do this, then you probably shouldn't be in the cloud—Ed.].

TransLattice hopes to announce support for new public clouds "soon," including global providers and ones with regional capabilities, but would not give firm details.

"I don't think [our database] precludes us from IBM," Lyle said. "IBM has shown a very good ability to be multi-vendor and vendor-agnostic."

TransLattice VS Oracle GoldenGate

Besides Google's Spanner, which is almost certainly not going to be sold as a standalone by Google, a major technology with which TransLattice competes is Oracle GoldenGate.

Oracle GoldenGate 11g dovetails into the Oracle database and gives administrators many of the global replication and redundancy features that TransLattice prides itself on.

"Things that take weeks to stand up in Oracle environments take hours to stand up in TransLattice nodes," Lyle says.

GoldenGate's architecture differs from TransLattice's.

By example, if Vulture Enterprises sold one stuffed avian in its San Francisco facility, GoldenGate would read the change in the database and let the Asian office's system know the creature was no longer available for sale. However, if both the Asian office and the SF facility were to each sell a vulture at exactly the same time, then an unfortunate Reg DBA would have to have defined reconciliation policies to deal with this.

"All the environments that come from [GoldenGate] get really complicated really fast," Lyle said.

"If you were to deploy a big transaction-processing environment with GoldenGate you'd deploy a big SAN, a big set of Oracle databases clustered using RAC, build volume redundancy, [and] you would use replication in order to provider disaster recovery for all these silos and use GoldenGate and Data Guard to keep in sync, then you would add logic to the app."

"In contrast in TransLattice you just deploy a bunch of nodes and it's one database."

Oracle declined to responded to various Vulture queries.

TransLattice 3.0 is available beginning on Tuesday. Pricing was not disclosed.

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