Over the past 4 weeks, we have been onboarding customers slowly.  Since the response to our restricted beta invitation was quite overwhelming, quite a few of you will experience some delays in getting an account.  The SSDS team is doing everything possible to get you onboarded as soon as possible.  I am happy to say that I am seeing the pace pick up a bit over the last week.  It is exciting for us to see the feedback we are receiving about the service.  We appreciate your interest in working with SSDS and your patience.

Eugenio Pace in his 5th article in a series on SSDS gives a pattern for cross container queries.  The article can be found here.  This is an important scenario since SSDS partitions data into containers to scale out the system.  But it actually limits scenarios like cross container queries and transactions.  Cross container queries can be loosely grouped into 2 patterns:

• Fan out queries: where a query can be run against every container in parallel and the results returned and a union-all performed at the client.  This is an important scenario for us and we are looking at how we can make this pattern run efficiently in SSDS.
• Queries that have cross container dependencies: join, sort and groupby across containers fall in this category.  Map-reduce is one option as it is a technique that is known to scale well when data is partitioned.  Again this is an important scenario and you can expect to see us make progress here as well.

Question for you, how far do you think fan out queries get you in your scenario?

Ryan Dunn, Technical Evangelist, recently interviewed Istvan Cseri, SSDS Architect and Nigel Ellis, SSDS Development Manager and Architect about SSDS and their vision for Cloud Data Services.  He posted his interview at Channel 9.  Check it out here.  Thanks Ryan for posting this video.  Hopefully it will give you the readers a better idea of how these leaders are thinking about data and services in the cloud.

Here is the link to some quick code Dave wrote up in 20 mins under pressure to demonstrate how easy it is to provision a SSDS Authority and Container and start inserting SSDS Flex Entities into them.  I hope this demonstrates that it is quite simple to get started with storing your structured data in SSDS and write an application against it. 

Hey Dave, I am hoping you had a taste of Chuck's Irish Bomb :-))  That stuff looks pretty evil.

Ryan has sent out an invitation to companies, individuals and startups in the Silicon Valley to attend a Strategic Design Review (SDR) for SSDS through his blog.  Since this invitation is going out to people who are not our traditional customers and have not attended a Microsoft SDR before, I thought we should point out that the product / service team shares the current offering and their plans in detail to get feedback from the audience at these events.  These reviews are fairly interactive with the product team presenting, holding hands on lab and panel discussions around all the aspects of building a great service.  To make it easier for technical and business decision makers from startups to attend, the SSDS team will be conducting these reviews without any NDA.  We are really interested in hearing from people who do not use any Microsoft technologies today.  Seats are limited so if you are interested, please get in touch with Ryan as soon as you can.  The event will be held at our Silicon Valley campus.  Hope to see you there.

Eugenio has published the 3rd installment of his article on building the Litware HR application that Nigel demonstrated at MIX08.  Here he discusses enhancement to his data access layer by caching data locally.  It is a good read.

Jeff Currier asked the community to send their questions about SSDS.  He got quite a few questions.  He answered quite a few.  I am adding some more clarifications to his answers.  

From Senkwe:
"I'm curious to know if you're going to have a service similar to Amazon S3. For the application I have in mind, "eventual consistency" of data would be a huge drawback."

There are 2 questions here:
1. Are we going to support large or small unstructured data (blobs) like S3?
The answer to this is yes.  It is in our plans.  How soon we will have it, we do not know yet.

2. Is "eventual consistency" the semantics of transactions in SSDS as well?
As Jeff said "We do not use a eventual consistency model.  The inserts you do are visible to your on your next query."  I should also stress that we do keep multiple copies but we use algorithms that guarantee consistency across the copies. 

From JamieT:

Can you bill individual users for their use of the authority rather than billing me, the ultimate owner of the service?
This is the scenario we call "bill on behalf of" a customer.  You are calling it the "revenue share" model.  Frankly we were not thinking of doing this.  But like you, we have heard from a few customers that they would like to:
a. Have their own billing plan but have us service it
b. Bill their customers on their behalf, charge them for overall usage and send the difference to them
As Jeff says, the billing plan is not nailed down right now.  It is a scenario we are including in our planning.  We will let you know when we have something concrete.

From rogerj:

1. What are your plans and timing for supporting associations/relationships plus lazy- and eager-loading?
Answer to the first question is that we will support the full EDM/EF/ADO.Net V3 model in due time.  It is a bit of work.  We do not have exact timing for it.  Once we do that we will have to address lazy and eager loading, right?

2. When will folks who signed up for the beta know if they've been accepted?
First batch should go out next week.  We will keep provisioning on a weekly basis from there on out.  By the way once the first batch gets provisioned, everyone else should be able to get to the technical documentation.

3. What's the schedule for an Atom/AtomPub implementation?
We are on this one.  Do not have the exact schedule to share at this time.

Keep the questions coming and we will try to answer them to the best of our abilities.

Namashkar,
Soumitra Sengupta