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On Thursday this week Jamie Thomson (of SSIS Junkie fame) and I will be presenting at the London SQL Server User Group which will be held at Microsoft’s offices in Cardinal Place and you can still register for the event online.  The pre-planned topic is ‘SQL Server in the Cloud’ and JRJ, who normally organizes the event, is out of town – so ...

As much as I avidly support cloud technologies and as much as I prefer using SQL Server, I can’t come up with a convincing reason to use or recommend SQL Data Services. SDS simply has no compelling (or obvious) business case. The reason for this is a limitation built in to SDS of a database size from 5GB-10GB, with a promise from Microsoft that ...

Many moons ago I wrote a blog entry MDM -> Entity Framework -> ADO.Net Data Services. Better together? where I opined about the inherent problems of using staticly-typed programming languages (such as C#) to interact with schema-less data stores. In that case the problem reared its head when trying to use Entity Framework on top the ...

There have been some snippets of information trickling out of the Microsoft PDC this evening about SQL Server Data Services (SSDS). Namely: That’s not its name anymore. Its now called SQL Data Services (SDS) SDS is the data layer in Windows Azure You can now do joins between different entities. Just by the very nature of cloud services ...

I mentioned yesterday in my blog entry Are database pros relevant on the RESTful web? that I’d be doing more blogging related to cloud computing and here is the first one. it regards SQL Server Data Services (SSDS). I’ve been using SSDS for a few months and during that time I’ve managed to create a lot of junk up in that there cloud….I’ve ...

If you've been reading my blog over the past year or so you'll have noticed that two things I've started to become really interested in are Master Data Management (MDM) and SQL Server Data Services (SSDS). The interest in SSDS, a cloud-based service in which an organisation can host their data, is a natural progression from my day job of the last ...

Last Friday at Conchango’s latest community day (something we have every 6 weeks where all of our 250 consultants down tools and get together back at base) I ran a cloud computing demo where I showed off some of the capabilities of SQL Server Data Services (SSDS). The demo used a .Net console application to create a new SSDS Authority (i.e. a ...

I recently got accepted onto the SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) beta program and have been getting to grips with the how, what and why of the service. For those that don't know SSDS is a cloud computing platform from Microsoft that allows us to store data in the cloud rather than host it on our own database servers. The data is ...

I have been keeping a close eye on machinations in the SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) arena and whilst the product hasn't reached the masses yet (I'm still waiting for my beta invite - hint hint) there is a still a lot of activity going on. There is a very active blog called The Long Term Storecast ...

SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) and Live Mesh are the two technologies that are uppermost in my mind at the moment. [My thoughts on SSDS are here and on Live Mesh here.] Hence then it didn't take me long to start wondering about the value of the two of them being integrated together. SSDS is a data storage platform and Live Mesh is a data ...