Bob Muglia, once president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business, which included products such as Windows Server, SQL Server, System Center and Windows Azure, is now CEO of Snowflake Computing, Inc. and bringing a new take on delivering database solutions to the enterprise.

Muglia sat down with George Gilbert, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to discuss the benefits of Database as a Service (DaaS).

The human treadmill of database management

Responding to Gilbert’s question about the difference between DaaS versus managed database services, Muglia replied, “It’s all about squirrels … It’s a service that can serve many, many customers effectively. It can run in an automated fashion. A managed service is really typically built by taking an on-premise system, hosting it the cloud and having people manage it.”

Explaining managed services further, Muglia told Gilbert that squirrels, meaning humans, are on the treadmill keeping the systems operating. With DaaS, the software runs the system. Muglia calls it software versus people.

Multi-tenant without partitions

Snowflake is a multi-tenant service that supports many customers in one shared environment. The company isolates customer data, encrypts customer data and provides customers with clusters to run and compute the data.

The service that is designed to operate and scale for many organizations runs in a multi-tenant way. With this software, there is no need to build indices or partitioning. There is no data to clean up from a DBA perspective because the software automates all of those knobs, Muglia added.

Essentially built from the ground up, Snowflake’s DaaS makes handling data easier, and if you need to enhance your analytics, the service works with products like Apache Spark to combine SQL, streaming and complex analytics.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Structure 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE