Thank you. The pure SQL is a cool twist, because you can instantly start getting fancy, e.g. doing JOINs between different services. In terms of value to the e

Thank you. The pure SQL is a cool twist, because you can instantly start getting fancy, e.g. doing JOINs between different services. In terms of value to the end-developer, there are a handful of value-add services we'll be rolling out that are a pain for people to implement: - Authentication - Federated search - ETL / caching - Record matching / fuzzy inference of foreign-key relationships - Entity de-duplication We also feel that Empire API will be exciting for pure client-side apps and apps that don't want to run a backend, e.g. the sort of apps that would build on Parse or Firebase.