Amazon Web Services has launched a hosted database service called DynamoDB, stepping into competition with platform-as-a-service providers such as Salesforce.com, Oracle and others.

Google's Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon's DynamoDB "for most workloads," Google says. Google today announced that Cloud Spanner, its distributed, decoupled relational database service ...

Google claims that, thanks to throughput and storage improvements to Cloud Spanner, the service is now effectively half the cost of DynamoDB.