[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.]
Cihan Biyikoglu has written an interesting article on database schema when working with Federations.
“With federations, you take parts of your schema and scale it out. With each federation in the root database, a subset of objects are scaled-out. You may create multiple federations because distribution characteristics and scalability requirements may vary across sets of tables. For example, with an ecommerce app, you may both have a large customer-orders set of tables and a very large product catalog that may have completely different distribution requirements.”
-Steve