[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.]
Today at PDC, Ray Ozzie announced our all up cloud services platform. It was a great day for a whole bunch of us who have worked on the database part of the platform for the past 2 years. We announced our cloud compute, storage and management service called Windows Azure. These are the essential services and we can think of this as the Cloud OS. Next we have the Azure Service Platform. This includes .Net Services, SQL Services and Live Services. Microsoft SQL Services is now the all up brand for the scale out database service in the cloud (SQL Data Services) and will include services like Data Sync, Reporting Services, Analytics Services, Integration Services and Reference Data Services over time. As part of this announcement, we now have an all new landing page for SQL Services here. Note that SQL Server Data Services is now going to be called Microsoft SQL Data Services or simply SQL Data Services. We are just dropping a ‘S’ from our name to align with the all up services brand.
Today Dave Campbell will kick-off our server and services presentation at 5:15 p.m. As usual there is a really cool demo that ties together SQL Server, SQL Services and Microsoft Sync Framework to show how the Data Platform is evolving all the way from device to the cloud. Tomorrow David Robinson will be presenting his tips and tricks talk on how to take advantage of SQL Data Services at a lunch session. At 3:30 p.m. tomorrow, I will be presenting the Lap Around SQL Data Services Session to go over some of the new features. And if you really want to know where we are headed, on Wednesday Patric McElroy will be presenting the SQL Data Services Futures talk where he is going to present some cool new demos that will show you some of the stuff we are incubating. If you want to see how we will align with ADO.Net Data Services, I suggest you attend his talk. Finally, if you really want to understand how we build our scale out database service using SQL Server as the database engine, you should attend Gopal Kakivaya’s talk titled Under the Hood of SQL Data Services. Gopal spent several years working on the technology that enables SQL Data Services to run on thousands of servers and provide a highly available service. He will dig into such geeky topics as failure detection, split brain, failover, partition management, ring topology etc. etc.
If you are at PDC, come see us at the Azure lounge in the big room where member of the team will be there to answer your questions. Look forward to seeing you at PDC.