Zoho CloudSQL: An interview with Rodrigo Vaca

Earlier this week, Zoho announced CloudSQL, a new SQL interface to Zoho Reports, its popular Web application for online reporting and business intelligence. Zoho applications (in case you haven't heard of them) are credible alternatives to Google Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications such as Google Docs. Launched three years ago, the suite of Zoho applications has grown dramatically in number of applications, richness of features, and size of its user base. The company now boasts over 1 million users for its 19 applications. More applications are on the way.


Here's how Rodrigo Vaca, Zoho's Director of Marketing, described CloudSQL in a blog post earlier this week:

Zoho CloudSQL is a middleware technology that allows customers to interact with their business data stored in Zoho through the familiar SQL language. Customers are able to access Zoho cloud data using SQL on both other cloud applications as well as through traditional on-premises software.

At a high-level, Zoho CloudSQL 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.

There are in particular 3 things that stand out about Zoho CloudSQL:

• It's the first technology that allows customers to interact with their data on the cloud, from another cloud application or from an on-premises one through real SQL.


• It supports multiple SQL dialects. We support all the major (and even some not so major) ones: ANSI, Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Informix.


• With our JDBC/ODBC drivers, developers can access data in the cloud just as easily as if it were stored in a local database.
  

A Quick Interview
I got in touch with Rodrigo Vaca to ask him a few follow-up questions.

JB: From your announcement, I'm gathering that CloudSQL is a SQL-based service for accessing data in Zoho applications. The interface will be of interest to engineers working on integration projects where they would like to simply work with SQL queries, rather than dealing with JSON or RESTful data access. Is this an accurate characterization?

RV: Yes, that's accurate. Zoho CloudSQL is about making the data in the Zoho cloud more accessible for our customers. SQL is something that most corporate developers know and are familiar with.


JB: The diagram on your December 2 blog post shows CloudSQL being able to access other Web services. Are there non-Zoho Web services you plan to support? Say, any Web services from StrikeIron, ProgrammableWeb, or even Google, etc.?

RV: Ah! You were paying attention! You noticed something that most other people missed. Yes, Zoho CloudSQL can be extended to non-Zoho services. At this point we're not focused or actively pursing that, since we need to first make sure that other Zoho services are accessible through CloudSQL first.

JB: Finally, I was intrigued to see that you're doing entity-mapping, which makes sense. It makes me think of the work Microsoft has been doing in its Project Astoria group (creating a framework now called ADO.NET), where they're using entity mapping to present a non-SQL-based interface to SQL-Server data. Do your RESTful APIs make use of this entity mapping? Does Zoho have plans to publish an Astoria-like interface to Zoho data?

RV: Our REST API should provide all the necessary details for developers, so we don't have plans for entity-mapping like Astoria. We would recommend CloudSQL, as the standard interface for developers, especially as we increase its coverage across Zoho applications.

To learn more about CloudSQL, visit this Zoho wiki page here.