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The big cloud news of the day is Amazon’s announcement of Amazon RDS, a MySQL database in the cloud.  There will be some interesting commentary over the next few days, particularly the timing of the announcement so close to Microsoft’s PDC, which is where Windows Azure and SQL Azure are to be officially launched.  Apart from the timing ...

Steve Marx (@smarx) rustled up a live chat this evening (9pm my time) between some people on the development team and us developers out in the wild.  It was an interesting opportunity to hear from the Azure team and other developers that are looking at Azure.  Steve will post his opinions and (maybe) the transcript to his blog, but I ...

We waited a long time for Microsoft to finally announce their Azure pricing as they have on their blog and an unveiling with much fanfare at their partner conference keynote as a type this.  Frankly, after waiting for so long, I expected Microsoft to come up with something a bit more imaginative than a copy/paste of the Amazon EC2 ...

In future, more and more solutions will have data that is not stored directly in a SQL database but rather in cloud EAV (Entity Attribute Value) data stores, caches, client storage, document databases and so on.  Usually it is the existing DBA’s and other SQL biased database experts that are the custodians of corporate data and, in general, ...

It was pointed out to me recently that my critical position on SQL Data Services and support for Azure in general are inconsistent, so I thought that a bit of clarification is required. SQL Server is my database of choice and have been using it since version 4.21, which was long before it became mainstream and I even spent a couple of years on ...

In the battle of the public vs private clouds, the lines have been drawn between those that offer infrastructure for use in existing data centres and those that offer platforms and services in their own data centres.  The discussions, while technically based, are philosophical, passionate, opinionated and about the market laggards trying to ...

Jamie and I gave presentations last night at the London SQL Server users group.  It was a good evening but I think I managed to upset about half the people there.  I suppose when your first two slides are these… …then you can expect a bit of an uphill battle. But, the other half seemed to enjoy it, and besides, if I am not pissing ...

This week Google announced immediate support for Java on AppEngine. While not surprising it does thrown down the gauntlet for PaaS (Platform as a Service) competitors such as Microosft’s Azure.  Technical details aside, there is a lot of Java code out there, a lot of Java developers and a whole new market to persue. A big part of Microsoft’s ...

By scratching deep enough into available material on SQL Data Services (SDS) you will uncover the limitations of the platform that make it very difficult to scale. It does not scale upwards because of the size limitation of the instance and it does not scale outwards because the SQL model does not handle partitions very well. The data has been ...

Thought I'd better get round to seeing how easy it was to get data into Azure storage and with the guys at Cerebrata allowing me to have an early peak at their beta Client for Azure storage offering I had run out of excuses not to . Azure storage is available in three forms: · Windows Azure Blob - provides storage for large data items. · ...