Today, Salesforce.com's next big thing was announced: Database.com.The actual service itself won't be available for developers to preview until sometime in 2011, most likely later in the year. Last year, Salesforce announced Chatter at Dreamforce, and that took 6 months to arrive as well.

But no matter when it arrives, Database.com is a game changer. I've long suspected that Salesforce.com wanted to go after Oracle, and this announcement finally proves it. But, at its core, I don't think this is about Oracle yet.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's CEO, made a big stink on stage about the fact that modern cloud-based data stores are, essentially, cloudy versions of old software. In clouds like Amazon an Rackspace, he inferred, most of the database architecture is based on existing infrastructure, and therefore, does not offer many of the benefits of the cloud. And he's right: the architecture of cloud applications is still being discovered and designed by developers around the world.

To that end, Database.com offers developers, at least in theory, the chance to forget entirely about their database. No more need for a DBA, no more time spent tweaking the database to get the maximum performance. Instead, it'll just be abut storing and fetching data, which is really all any developer ever wants from their database.

That is, unless they want to run stored procedures. But the Salesforce team says that these will also be supported in Database.com. At the end of the day, if this platform is executed properly, it could offers some extremely compelling cost savings in people-power alone. That's why I'll be watching how developers respond to Database.com.