After a healthy dumping of March snow here in Redmond yesterday, the clouds have changed and it is now a clear and sunny day.  Kind of appropriate I think given the announcement from our sister team SQL Data Services this morning.  In today’s announcement it was stated that SQL Data Services: "will become the first relational database service in the market to provide customers with the ability to use existing investments in T-SQL development and use a full relational data model in the Cloud" We in the Sync Framework team have been patiently waiting for this big announcement.   Just like the customers that have asked for this change, for our project "Huron" this has been an incredibly positive change in our goal to allow databases to be shared via the cloud.  For us it has:

• Greatly simplified the development effort.  Now we can base even more of our architecture on Sync Services for ADO.NET technology.  Specifically the server provider in Sync Services for ADO.NET, used to powers companies with scales of 80,000 mobile workers can now also be used within our hosted sync service.  
• Provided a well known and proven architecture and allows us to spend more resources on making the client side experience and sync service even better --  my personal goal is that an Access, SQL Compact or SQL Server user can start sharing their database via the cloud in under 3 minutes.  
• Allowed an even greater level of scalability.  Previously, the architecture of SQL Data Services required us to transform from relational to entity format.  Now, we will be able to maintain the relational format of the data which will have a big impact on performance.
• Enabled the use of SQL Server integrated change tracking capabilities within our sync service for even greater sync and change tracking performance

In fact, we have been working for some time on a prototype of “Huron” using a new sync service hosted within Azure against relational cloud storage.  Keep an eye out here for a webcast where I will walk through this and some of our other project goals.

While I am at it, I also wanted to send a thank-you to all of those who took the time to join our “Huron” early adopter program at SQLServicesLabs.com.  As some of you may have noticed we have stopped accepting applications (for now).  This is simply because we could not keep up with the responses and did not feel we could support any more customers in the early adopter stages of our program.  If anything, we have heard loud and clear your requirements in this area, but please feel free to continue to send me your thoughts and ideas. 

I am not quite ready to talk about the public release date other than to state that the goal is to get something into your hands to play with by the end of this year. 

Stay tuned for more!

Liam Cavanagh