Cloud Data Hub. Synchronize Your Data in the Cloud. | AzureJournal

In the previous article about SQL Data Services (SDS) I mentioned one of the most exciting technologies coming out from Microsoft this year: Data Hub, “an aggregation of enterprise, partner, desktop and device data within SQL Data Services”. It is a service, hosted in the Azure data centers along with SQL Data Services you can use to synchronize your on-premises database with the database in the cloud. This service is completely based on the Microsoft Sync Framework technology.

What you can do with it, is you can take an existing database on your premises, and sync-enable it, mainly you can specify tables, rows, which should be published to the cloud. What the sync service will do, will take the schema from your database and will create an identical schema in the cloud database, then the data you want to be synchronized will be uploaded as well. Because is a true synchronization service, any changes on any side (on premises or cloud) will be synchronized on the other side.

The real beauty of the service is that anybody can write sync providers, so not only Microsoft SQL databases can be synchronized, but also other databases like SQLite, MySql, etc. The sync provider knows how to talk the data store, how to get changes and apply those changes back and forth. This will open the doors to developers to quickly use the service in their applications without worrying about the complexities of developing and maintaining such service (not even talking about security issues developers need to take in consideration). Microsoft is already working on releasing SQL compact provider so windows mobile data can be easily shared with the cloud. After the initial release, there’s going to be more providers available for the community.

Even for platforms that don’t have sync framework, the entire Sync Framework runtime will be available in the cloud, so all you need to do is to write a small shim, maybe for a SQLite database on your iPhone that talks to Microsoft Sync Framework public API’s in the cloud and synchronizes the data with the database in the cloud.

The first version of the service, when available, won’t have a straight-forward way to synchronize databases when the schema of the database changes. There will be some workaround you can implement in case you need this feature, with more details coming up as we approach commercial availability.

Microsoft will also make available a set of tools to use with this technology, a set of publish/subscribe wizards that will make it easy to set up synchronization of your local database with the cloud database, without writing any code.

As I mentioned, the new Cloud Data Hub has a lot of potential. If the price for storing and accessing data in the cloud will be affordable, many startups can build really complex applications with minimal effort and investment, focusing on their core business, not on the intricacies of building a data synchronization mechanism.

The SQL Data Services Community Technology Preview (CTP) will be available soon. You can join the mailing list in order to receive an e-mail notification when it will become available.

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