I have compared some of Amazon’s database in the cloud offerings with Google’s and especially the Google BigQuery API in my latest article. With more than 2 years under its belt for development, Google BigQuery API is a good service to test out if you want to reduce dependencies on database vendors.
Read it at
Google BigQuery API Makes Big Data Analytics Easy

http://blog.programmableweb.com/2012/08/07/google-bigquery-api-makes-big-data-analytics-easy/