Sharding has been around for a while and I have seen quite a few systems that utilize SQL Azure with 100s Databases and 100s of compute nodes and tweeted and written about them in the past. Like this case with Flavorus; Ticketing Company Scales to Sell...

If you worked with federations, I am sure you are already know about the online tools like SQL Azure Management Portal that give you the ability to orchestrate your federations with repartitioning operations or resize member MAXSIZE and edition. In episode...

Brian has a tone of samples on PHP and Federations in this post right here... Another great one! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/silverlining/archive/2012/01/18/using-sql-azure-federations-via-php.aspx -cihan

I know I already posted a whole bunch on “ why use federations ” or “ what are federation for ” but most conversations on federations, I get the question on ‘why’? so I wanted to go back to basics and what the combination...

Welcome back. In the previous post: Introduction to Fan-out Querying , we covered the basics and defined the fragments that make up the fan-out query namely the member and summary queries. Fan-out querying refer to querying multiple members. We looked...

Entity Framework is a popular these days in many web applications and I get EF support in federations question a few times a week these days… Here is a quick collection of of articles on the topic; This post just came out on the Entity Framework and Federations...

Happy 2012 to all of you! 2011 has been a great year. We now have federations live in production with SQL Azure. So lets chat about fanout querying. What is a fan-out query? Federations provide a model for partitioning parts of your schema over...

Dan posted a great comment to my previous blog post and I think the question he is raising is worth a blog post! Thanks for the question Dan! Here is Dan’s question: Dan - Tue, Dec 13 2011 11:57 AM Cihan, thanks for keeping us all posted all the way until...

Wooohooowwwy! Finally the day arrives! The year end update to SQL Azure is live and you can now use federations across all geographies of SQL Azure. There also a great new surprise we have been working on; we are making Federations available through...

Now that Federations is live in production, lets talk about how the billing model works for federations. Good news is the model is very simple; With federations, every member can be considered a regular SQL Azure database. In fact, sys.database in master...

In part 2 we talked about federation metadata history views. Federation history views only report operation that completed. For monitoring ongoing operations federations provide a separate set of dynamic management views under sys.dm_federation_operation...

Not sure if you all know Herve Roggero but he has been a great community leader and MVP driving scalable programming models for the cloud. Here is a quick video he and I recorded to thank him for all the work he put in on SQL Azure and especially on federations...

In the previous post , I talked about how the federation metadata is formed to let you traverse the whole federation relationship within a database. In part 2 we will take a look at how you can basically go back in time to look at all the changes on federation...

One of the great value propositions of federations is the ability to represent all the data distribution on the server side for both your schema (for example which parts of your schema you want to scale out and using what keys etc) and your runtime layout...

Hi everyone, hope you enjoyed the keynote this morning on SQL Azure. You can watch the azure section of the keynote here at the 1:25:00 mark. You can also look at that great 3D pie chart over and over again! Had to put that in there! 5 mins taking you...

Nice fresh sample from Full Scale180’s guys called Cloud Ninja. “The Cloud Ninja - SQL Azure Federations Project is a sample demonstrating the use of SQL Azure Federations in creating multi-tenant solutions. SQL Azure Federations can be a useful tool...

  Federations is on its way out the door with the next update of SQL Azure. With that, I’ll be on the road performing. Here is the schedule. Stop by, say hi and speak up to talk about your own “federation” stories! SQL PASS – Seattle, WA – Oct 11...

One of the most popular tools for migrating your databases to SQL Azure is the SQL Azure Migration Assistant. Good friend George Huey finished off the extensions to it recently and now, it has a version of the tool that can help move large data into SQL...

In federations, federations member contain part of the data that is in a federation. The range of data contained in a federation member depends on the layout of the partitioning you have in your federations. There could be 10s or 100s of federation members...

Referential Integrity in Federations Federation provide a great scale-out model with independent member databases. Even thought many local referential integrity rules are supported, federations place restrictions on costly referential integrity rules...

We first talked about SQL Azure Federation in Nov 2010 at PDC. We are getting ready to ship federations before the end of the calendar year 2011. It has been an amazing journey and with over a 100 customer in the federation technology preview program...

This discussion came up today in the preview program aliases today and I wanted to summarize some of our thinking on the topic; Federations in SQL Azure provide the ability to setup a distributed database tier with many member databases. Scaling in distributed...

Recent Update: the program is at full capacity and nomination survey is now closed. Thank you for the great number of nominations. For questions about the program details, you can contact us at SAPESupport@Microsoft.Com. Microsoft SQL Azure Federations...

Repartitioning operations is a large part of the value of federations. The ability to repartition databases enable elasticity in the database tier. With federations online repartitioning operations, database tiers can be made even stretch-ier. Scheduling...

When working with federations, database schema requires a special consideration. 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...