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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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Earlier this week The Register posted an article “'Full' SQL Server planned for Microsoft's Azure cloud” which included a few unsurprising comments about the feedback cycle that SQL Data Services (SDS), which is still in beta, is going through.  An interesting read, but not much news – and besides, The Register, could be called the IT Tabloid ...

There are all sorts of questions yet to be answered appropriately by the cloud providers around the areas of SLA's, confidentiality , flexibility of the various cloud models and security around data being uploaded into the cloud . The recent problems with the azure services ( to be fair its still in preview mode)  and Google mail are a timely ...

There is no doubt that SQL Data Services (SDS) looks, feels and smells very different to the SQL Server that we have grown accustomed to over the years.  The model is obviously different but there is little formal and clear description by Microsoft on what that model is – the pros and cons and the reasons for the change within the context of ...

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 ...

I've signed up for the beta created my solution  and so to really get started I needed to prepare my dev env . This involved installing the Azure SDK and installing the  CloudService msi which provides a Cloud environment for local testing and debugging . Debugging  live Cloud applications will be an interesting  ...

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 ...