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InfoQ Homepage News SQL Data Services Moving To a Full SQL Server Database in the Cloud

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SQL Data Services Moving To a Full SQL Server Database in the Cloud

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Feb 27, 2009 1 min read

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Last week InfoQ asked if RDBMS has its place in the cloud. All the big cloud vendors (Amazon, Google and Microsoft) are using a key/value store today. However, on the MSDN Developer Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft reported they will make RDBMS features of SQL Server available through SQL Data Services (SDS) after feedback from ISV’s.

Gavin Clarke of the Register UK interviewed Mark Hindsbro, General Manager Developer and Platform Evangelism:

According to Hindsbro, partners want a full SQL Server database in the cloud. The current SQL Data Services (SDS), which became available last March, provides a lightweight and limited set of features.

Microsoft is still unclear on which RDBMS features they are thinking about. Gavin continues:

He did not say what SQL Server features Microsoft would add to Azure, other than to say it'll include greater relational functionality.
…
Microsoft in a statement also did not provide specifics, but said it's "evolving SDS capabilities to provide customers with the ability to leverage a traditional RDBMS data model in a cloud-based environment. Developers will be able to use existing programming interfaces and apply existing investments in development, training, and tools to build their applications."

On the OakLeaf Systems blog, they mention that SDS is not aligning up with the new data technologies available on the .NET platform and its limited query syntax, as possible reasons for Microsoft to change direction:

The result of this [Microsoft] policy were schemaless EAV tables that offered flexible properties (property bags) in an Authority-Container-Entity (ACE) architecture that mystified .NET developers, who were then in the process of about-facing their mindset from traditional SQL queries to .NET 3.5’s Language Integrated Query (LINQ) constructs and object/relational mapping with LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework. SSDS offered SOAP and REST data access protocols with a very limited query syntax.

Some important questions remains to be answered. Are Microsoft sacrificing scalability because existing customers want to utilize their existing knowledge? Or do they have a plan for architecting existing SQL Server technologies to scale in the cloud? What do you think?

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Community comments

  • Lets stop painting everything with the same brush...

    by Billy Newport,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Of course they are. How has the world survived so far with databases running on under 8 cores. Judging by these kinds of stories, it would seem impossible that any of them have managed at all. Most applications DO NOT NEED A THOUSAND SERVERS to host a data service. Microsoft are looking at using cloud farms for hosting traditional applications as well as the scale out stuff where SQL Server might not be appropriate but a combination of velocity with SQL Server must just work fine for a lot more and finally you have applications that need HBase,SimpleDB etc.

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  • Concept-oriented model and cloud computing

    by Alexandr Savinov,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    SQL is too complex and too low-level language, particularly, because it requires joins. Concept-Oriented Model (CoM) is a novel model which is join-free and has some features which make it rather interesting for cloud computing applications. In particular, it is easily distributed because all data exist in a virtual domain-specific address space. This model also has its programming counter-part: Concept-Oriented Programming (CoP). Thus programming and data modeling are two parts of one model. The both programming and data modeling approaches rely on the same new construct, called concept.

    Informal Introduction into the Concept-Oriented Programming

    Informal Introduction into the Concept-Oriented Model

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