Posted by Alin Irimie
on June 10, 2009
I wrote previously about the potential of SQL Data Services, the sql-in-the-cloud offering from Microsoft. Today, Shankar Pal, the Principal Program Manager for SQL Data Services (SDS) team mentioned in the SQL Data Services blog that Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive (EHA) is built in the cloud, using SDS. He writes about how well the SDS relational database service platform scales and provides some simple design principles to achieve maximum scalability .
Make no mistake about it, this is a big deal. Continue reading…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on June 03, 2009
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. Continue reading…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on May 27, 2009
One thing in the Microsoft cloud I find really interesting is SQL Data Services and Huron/Data Hub - SQL cloud sync service, one of the “cloud” offerings I believe has lots of potential and will really make sharing of data in the cloud so much easier.
I had the pleasure to sit down and talk about this subject with Liam Cavanagh, Sr. Program Manager at Microsoft, with the SDS/Huron team, and get some insights about the current state and the future of this remarkable new technology. In this article I’ll talk about SQL Data Services, and I’ll follow up with one about Data Hub/Huron.
SQL Data Services is at the core, nothing more than a (Microsoft SQL) database-as-a-service offering from Microsoft, part of the Azure Services Platform. First thing you’ll find about SQL Data Services is that “is just SQL” (at least that’s how Microsoft is advertising it). And it is. Continue reading…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on March 11, 2009
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?
Continue reading…
