FullScale 180 folks have a great post on windrows azure blog today. Trent’s post provides great insight into what it takes to building large scale database solutions and how sharding gets simplified with SQL Federations. Want to read more… Here is the...

Identity and timestamp are important pieces of functionality for many existing apps for generating IDs. Federation impose some restrictions on identity and timestamp and clearly we need alternatives for federations that can scale to the targets of scale...

In part 1, I focused on modeling your data for scale. That was the first step in the scale-first design process. Scale-first data modeling focuses on table groups that needs scale and federations and federation keys that help surround these table groups...

AzureWatch has a great new experience now for watching Federations. With AzureWatch it gets easier to monitor the whole deployment in an aggregate view for the following resource dimensions; Database Size Number of open transactions Number of open connections...

This is a talk I did a few weeks ago that will take you under the hood of SQL Azure. I cover the gateway to SQL Azure that manager billing, connectivity and some parts of T-SQL as well as Engine and surrounding services like load balancing and node governance...

Today SQL Server 2012 is released to web and now we have a new set of bits that provide great enterprise class data management capabilities that stretches the boundaries of SQL Server to the public and private cloud. With SQL Server 2012, moving back...

Scale-first approach to database design refer to the approach used when designing data models that has scalability as their primary concern. To recap the purpose of federations I talk about 2 properties: unlimited scale and the best economics. These are...

10 weeks ago we shipped federations in SQL Azure and it is great to see the momentum grow. This week, I'll be spending time with our MVPs in Redmond and we have many events like this where we get together with many of you to talk about what you'd like...

I started programming on mainframes and all of us would have thoughts these mainframes would be gone by now. Today, mainframes are still around as well as many Windows XPs, Excel 2003s and many more Reporting Services 2008s out there. Doors aren't shut...

In case you guys have not seen this; Maxim Glukhankov has a new sample on codeplex that shows how to set up OData on top of SQL Azure Federations. Just go under “Source Code” at the top and download! http://odatafederation.codeplex.com/ Not every tool...

Well I am sure you noticed that federation’s support SPLIT AT and DROP AT commands but not MERGE AT yet today. What would this MERGE command do? It would do the symmetric opposite of SPLIT. SPLIT introduces a new split point into the federation. So MERGE...

The new pricing model is an amazing improvement over the original model. In 60 seconds here are the 2 major improvements you will notice: #1 - New 100MB Option: Smaller databases has been a big ask. If you do not have a multi-tenant database tier,...

Ambrish posted a great new article on the Windows Azure Team Blog on new functionality coming in SQL Server 2012 Management Studio for Federations. Here is the full writeup; http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/02/15/managing-federations...

What a great day! first there is some great news on SQL Azure pricing changes and now the AdventureWorks database is out with a new version for SQL Azure and it contains a flavor that is scaled-out with Federations. Thanks to Scott we now have a scalable...

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...

Note: the article has been updated with the new pricing model that went into effect in Feb 2012. 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...

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...