Outsourced SQL Providers?
SwellJoe: Have you thought about the latency increase inherent in moving your database across the city or state or country?  You may be surprised by how large an impact this can have on overall application performance.YC company FathomDB (http://fathomdb.com) set off on this path and have/had some interesting ideas about caching and such.  I think they settled down to specifically providing service to EC2 users, so they could insure nearness and low-latency.  The latency problem is an extremely difficult one to solve.  I believe there have been a couple of other YC companies chasing similar dragons.  I don't know their names off-hand.  But, databases are an obviously large market ripe for change, so there's going to be some money made there...and so there are probably dozens of companies laboring away on the problem as we speak.Why are you looking to outsource?  You might consider just outsourcing the backup and data retention, instead, since backups as a service is well-understood and has lots of providers.