Windows Azure Services Platform Changes

.NET Services July 2009 CTP Release

An one more CTP of Windows Azure was made available and this one has some interesting points like Windows 7 RC Support, easier setup, but of course the large amount of changes is in terms of connecting heterogeneous environments, in terms of:

• Connect Applications and users
• Interoperability by Default, very important since it supports now even more standards than before
• Federation of Data, Messages, Identity and Access, that makes solutions more easier to interoperate between each other.

Of course this changes occur in the spectrum of the .NET Services Bus and Access Control, since the Workflow Services is now offline in order to incorporate more customer feedback.

Check more information here.

SQL Data Services

Now we can look at SQL Data Services as a real Database, and now give support for TSQL in SQL Data Services, of course in this release we only have a subset of TSQL, but this is a good way to go.

Of course there are differences between SQL Server on-Premise and SQL Data Services and some of they are:

“(…)

• SDS is a multi-tenant system
• The hardware resources are owned, hosted and maintained by Microsoft
• SDS is a service

(…)”

So what’s in?

• DDL
  • FUNCTION
  • INDEX
  • PROCEDURE
  • ROLE
  • SCHEMA
  • STATISTICS
  • SYNONIM
  • TABLE
  • TRIGGER
  • VIEW

• DML
  • SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE functionality
  • DML triggers
  • JOINs
  • Transactions
  • A large number of built-in functions (aggregates, math, date and time, ranking, etc.)

• Manageability
  • Query tuning via SET SHOWPLAN and SET STATISTICS
  • Index tuning via create and drop index
  • Statistic management via UPDATE STATISTICS
  • Information schema views and system catalog views (e.g., sys.databases)
  • Local HA is automatically provided as part of the service.
  • Upcoming version of SSMS and VS tools will work against SDS

Ok very nice v1 of SQL Data Services, check more in this post from the SQL Data Services Team.