We're pleased to announce that Socialbrowse is now running on FathomDB! FathomDB is database as a service, allowing businesses to offload their database administration to FathomDB, which runs the server on a scalable, cloud infrastructure. This provides some big benefits:

* Database can be scaled from a very small instance up to nearly 14GB of memory (currently!).
* Pay only for the resources that you use
* Automated backups
* Tools for monitoring performance and queries

Moving our Socialbrowse data to FathomDB has been provided us a big relief. As anyone who has followed the Ma.gnolia saga knows, database management is a critical component to any startup. However, most startup founders are not also database experts and the degree of difficulty in properly setting up a scalable, safe database is very high. The worst part is you don't know you've screwed up until it's too late! Rather than hoping we were doing everything right, we'd only sleep well at night if we knew that our data was safe. Justin Santa Barbara, our friend and the founder of FathomDB, is the smartest database guy we know, so we can rest assured knowing our data is in good hands.

Setting up our database on FathomDB was simple. In fact, from the time we registered, we had our data migrated and running in under 30 minutes. Once you've ported your database to FathomDB, scaling, backups and monitoring are built right in. As Socialbrowse grows and needs more resources to run our database, we can easily upgrade our server in minutes. In fact, our friends at WebMynd are using FathomDB to insert up to 100 records per second! Additionally, FathomDB provides built in monitoring and analysis of your database's resource usage and requirements, making it much easier to determine when an upgrade (or downgrade) is needed, and diagnosing queries that are chewing up the most resources.

What has been the effect so far? Now Dave and I have been able to focus our attention solely on development, rather than database management tasks. Using Amazon EC2, we'd had to maintain a separate instance to serve as a slave and perform periodic backups to S3. Maintaining this setup and ensuring its proper operation became a huge hassle. Now we no longer have to support a slave instance to back up our database and we are able to downgrade the size of our web server instance since it no longer has to share resources with the database. And as a result, our sleep has greatly improved!

A snapshot of FathomDB's monitoring tools.