Zoho with its wide range of hosted productivity and business applications collects, mines and exposes a lot of structured and unstructured data to users. For developers working over the Zoho Platform, to extend and customize the various web services, it offers a comprehensive Web API over HTTP for most of the Zoho Services. Currently Zoho Web API is the means to access and manipulate the data collected by the various Zoho services. But one drawback with the current Web API over HTTP is the non-standard interface for querying and data manipulation, which could add up to the learning curve, adoption and maintenance.

Zoho CloudSQL is a platform API service that enables developers to use Standard SQL (Structured Query Language) querying over the Web, to access and manipulate data that is available in various Zoho Services in the Cloud (hence the name CloudSQL). SQL being a standard query language of databases and data marts, it provides a much familiar and expressive development model for developers, thus making it easy to adopt and develop upon. With CloudSQL, Zoho Platform becomes first of its kind to offer full fledged standard SQL Querying over the Web.

Developers could execute SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE SQL statements over the Web to handle the data in Zoho Services with CloudSQL. Another powerful facet of CloudSQL is the support for multiple SQL dialects which could be used by developers to construct their SQL queries. CloudSQL supports SQL queries written in any of ANSI, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Informix dialects. This enables developers to easily adopt CloudSQL, if they are familiar in any one of the database dialects mentioned.

For more information on Zoho CloudSQL visit http://cloudsql.zoho.com/

Zoho Reports and Zoho CloudSQL

Zoho Reports, the online reporting and business intelligence service, is the first Zoho service to adopt Zoho CloudSQL. Developers could execute SQL SELECT statements over the web to handle the data in Zoho Reports.

Key Highlights of Zoho Reports CloudSQL Implementation

The key highlights of Zoho Reports CloudSQL implementation are:

SQL querying over HTTP
- Currently it supports SELECT querying over HTTP
- INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE statements will be supported soon
Supports SQL Querying in multiple dialects including ANSI, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, Sybase, PostgreSQL and Informix dialects. Users can execute queries written in any of this dialects.
Enables application connectivity using Zoho Reports JDBC driver to interact with the Zoho Reports Service.
- ODBC driver will be supported soon

Next: SQL Query Entity Mapping

2 Comments Show recent to old

Prithwis Mukerjee, 347 - days ago

How difficult is it for Zoho to bundle a CloudSQL client along with a popular framework like Ruby-on-Rails ?

Currently Ruby-on-Rails is generally distributed with MySQL. If you create a distribution of Ruby that is bundled with CloudSQL -- "Ruby on Clouds" -- your popularity should shoot up exponentially ...

Think about it

zohodbhelp, 340 - days ago

Hi Prithwis,

Thanks for the comment. Thats a really good idea. In the immediate roadmap we have plans to support a client library for Ruby-on-rails, such that developers over Ruby-on-rails can easily interact with Zoho CloudSQL. This would be first done for Zoho Reports which currently supports Zoho CloudSQL, followed by other services.

Wrt. distribution of Ruby with CloudSQL, thats an idea which needs further analysis. For the immediate future, we do not see us pursuing it.

Thanks for your inputs,
Clarence