An update to the Azure SQL Database Elastic Scale preview is now available for integrating into your applications. Elastic Scale is designed to simplify development and management of transactional applications that grow their relational data processing power by scaling-out – a pattern known as sharding.

Update Highlights

The update contains several improvements based on your feedback during the Preview, and is available in NuGet directly through your Visual Studio projects.

• Elastic Scale client library update – a new version of the library enables the asynchronous programming pattern available in ADO.Net and improves supportability.
• Split-Merge service update – includes new data movement options for a broader range of shard maps, as well as a high-availability configuration for the service.

Developers are using Elastic Scale today to build cloud services that easily scale to support hundreds or thousands of end-customers (tenants) – either by creating separate databases for tenants, or by using a set of databases where each handles multiple tenants. Others are using Elastic Scale technology to manage temporal data collection scenarios where information is distributed across many databases partitioned by time.

Getting Started

To help you learn more about database scale-out and sharding, the AzureCAT team recently published a guide on the subject covering best practices and concepts. The articles in that series, Optimizing Data Elasticity Through Database Sharding provide an excellent background if you plan to use Elastic Scale in your application.

To learn more about Azure SQL Database Elastic Scale, visit our Getting Started guide. If you already work with Elastic Scale, take advantage of the update by following step-by-step instructions here. We look forward to your continuing feedback as you work with Elastic Scale to build highly-scalable database applications.