Patent ID: 8316044

Claim:
A method comprising: a first party managing one or more database systems comprising one or more database servers and one or more database storage devices; based on information describing a subscription of a second party to one or more database services supported by the one or more database systems managed by the first party, the first party configuring the one or more database systems by at least allocating one or more database resources of the one or more database systems for use by the second party; wherein the second party is different than the first party; wherein the database services include services for storing and managing data provided by the second party in one or more tables on the one or more database storage devices; one or more computing devices of the first party responding to requests, from one or more database applications of the second party, to access the one or more database services to which the second party is subscribed using the allocated one or more database resources, wherein responding to the requests comprises a database server of the one or more database systems executing a database query received over a network to retrieve at least a portion of the data provided by the second party from a table stored in the one or more database storage devices; wherein at least the responding is performed by the one or more computing devices.