Microsoft the First to Deliver Full Relational Database in the Cloud

SQL Data Services team at Microsoft, proudly announced that SDS will deliver full relational database capabilities as a service. They promise to hold true to some on the main “cloud” principles, things like High Availability, Fault Tolerance, Friction Free Provisioning, Pay As You Grow Scaling, Immediate Consistency. They are still delivering on these promises and have added to the mix true relational capabilities, T-SQL and compatibility with the existing developer and management tools ecosystem.

The services can be accessed using TDS. TDS stands for Tabular Data Stream and it’s the published protocol that clients use to communicate with SQL Server. From its inception, SDS has always been built on the SQL Server technology foundation and it just made sense to allow our users to access their data via TDS. Most importantly for developers, this means symmetric SQL Server functionality and behavior combined with compatibility with the existing tools you are familiar with. This way, we’ll have: Tables, Stored Procedures, Triggers, Views, Indexes, Visual Studio Compatibility, ADO.Net Compatibility, ODBC Compatibility.

A majority of database applications will “just work”, allowing developers to target on and off-premises deployments with essentially the same code base. The initial scenarios they’re targeting are things like web and departmental applications.

What about Security?

All communications with the service is SSL encrypted and the initial authentication will be using SQL Authentication.

Of course, SQL Data Services remains one of the key developer services of the Azure Services Platform - that hasn’t changed. Consuming SDS from within an Azure application has never been easier and we will continue to ensure this is a feature rich, friction-free experience.

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