The Relational Cloud Project is an effort by a group of researchers at MIT to investigate technologies and challenges related to Database-as-a-Service within cloud-computing. They are trying to figure out how the advantages of the DaaS (Database-as-a-Service) model, that we've seen arise in other areas like OLAP and NoSQL, can be applied to relational databases. The DaaS advantages as they see them are: 1) predictable costs, proportional to the quality of service and actual workloads, 2) lower technical complexity, thanks to a unified and simplified service access interface, and 3) virtually infinite resources ready at hand. An interesting description of their approach is explained in the paper Relational Cloud: A Database-as-a-Service for the Cloud. From the abstract:
