Preview: Azure SQL Database Elastic Scale
Published date: October 02, 2014
The new Azure SQL Database Elastic Scale APIs simplify the process of scaling out (and in) a cloud application’s data tier by streamlining development and management. Based on industry-standard sharding practices, Elastic Scale offers functionality to help you build and maintain applications that can span just a few databases—or thousands. The capabilities are provided through a set of .NET Framework client libraries and through Azure service templates you can host, offering more development flexibility to meet the unique needs of your applications. The Elastic Scale preview is available at no additional cost to you; however, any database created as a result of these APIs will incur corresponding database charges. Existing SQL Database Federations customers have been provided a migration path from the soon-to-be-retired Federations feature to the Elastic Scale feature, with minimal application changes and without the need to move data. Federations will be available to existing customers until the Web and Business service tiers are retired in September 2015. For more information about Elastic Scale or to download the preview APIs, go to SQL Database Elastic Scale.