SQL Azure Team Blog : Database as a Service

So… What do you think?

davidrob — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:40:42 GMT

One of the most important pieces of information a product team can get is an understanding of what people think about their product, and how they are using it. My question for you is…What do you think? How has your experience been thus far? We would love to know – the good and the bad.

So please feel free to either post a comment or drop me an email (david.robinsonATmicrosoft.com).

Also, don’t forget the SQL Azure documentation can be found here and the SQL Azure Getting Started forum is located here.

Dave

Try SQL Azure Database CTP Today

davidrob — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:01:00 GMT

Check out the free trial of Microsoft® SQL Azure Database Community Technology Preview (CTP). SQL Azure Database, a part of the Windows Azure platform, is a cloud-based database service built on Microsoft SQL Server technology. With SQL Azure organizations will benefit from a pay-as-you grow model with enterprise-class availability, data protection, scalability, and security.

Also available as a CTP is the SQL Server Driver for PHP 1.1, which provides new capabilities for building PHP applications and support for SQL Azure, enabling developers to build PHP apps with relational database capabilities using SQL Server or SQL Azure Database. The CTP for the SQL Server Driver for PHP is available for download today.

With the explosion of data-driven Web 2.0 applications, along with the need to extend existing applications and build innovative data solutions in the cloud – these are exciting milestones. With SQL Azure, developers building Web 2.0, ASP.NET and PHP applications can use familiar tools and data models to develop on a pay-as-you-grow, secure, scalable and highly available database service at minimal infrastructure cost. In fact, there are really no comparable solutions available today --- we are leading the industry by offering a relational database service. When hosting your application in Windows Azure and with SQL Azure as your cloud database, building credible, reliable cloud-based applications becomes very easy.

The SQL Azure Database CTP includes:

· Relational data model supporting Transact-SQL (T-SQL), including T-SQL stored procedures. Access SQL Azure with familiar data access APIs such as ODBC, ADO.Net, PHP, etc. The high degree of compatibility with SQL Server enables easy migration of existing Line of Business (LOB) or Web applications to the cloud.

· Self-provisioning, auto-healing and disaster recovery, with high availability and no physical database administration. Self service provisioning means you can provision any number of databases and not have to worry about machines, disks, or server configuration.

Pay-as-you-grow multi-tenant scalable service model.
Efficiencies from an enterprise class data center without the administrative overhead.
Support for familiar tools so developers can leverage existing skills to speed time to solution

SQL Server Driver for PHP CTP will include:

Support for SQL Azure, PHP version 5.3, and UTF-8
Support for Scrollable results and row count
Migration to the SQL Server 2008 Native Client framework with enhanced performance

SQL Azure Database will be available as a free trial until the service goes live in November. SQL Azure Database will be available in two editions: Web Edition, which will include up to 1 GB of relational data, priced at $9.99 per month, and Business Edition, which will include up to 10 GB of data, priced at $99.99 per month.

Other Resources:

· Register for SQL Azure Database CTP (Note: due to high demand there may be delays in issuing invitation codes as we onboard new participants.)

· Additional information on SQL Azure

· Windows Azure Platform Training Kit

· Download SQL Server Driver for PHP 1.1

· Additional information on SQL Server Driver for PHP.

Accessing SDS From PHP

nigele — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:44:00 GMT

Hi folks, this is Nigel Ellis and I’m an architect on the SQL Services team. I’ve just returned from MIX2009 where I announced our new relational service in my What's New with SQL Data Services talk. You can watch the full video and download the slides from here.

During my talk, I demonstrated running an application on Windows Azure using PHP to interact with a database hosted in our new relational SQL data service. I used the unified ODBC support built in to PHP to interact with SDS. I’ve included a sample code snippet below which uses an SDS server server.data.dev.mscds.com:

<?php

$host = "server.data.dev.mscds.com";

$dbname = "database";

$dbuser = "user@server";

$dbpwd = "password";

$driver = "{SQL Server Native Client 10.0}";

// Build connection string

$dsn="Driver=$driver;Server=$host;Database=$dbname;Encrypt=true;TrustServerCertificate=true";

if (!($conn = @odbc_connect($dsn, $dbuser, $dbpwd))) {

die("Connection error: " . odbc_errormsg());

}

// Got a connection, run simple query

if ($qh = @odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT A, B FROM myTable")) {

// Dump query result

$rows = 0;

while ( $row = @odbc_fetch_object($qh) ) {

echo("$rows: $row->A $row->B\r\n");

$rows++;

}

@odbc_free_result($qh);

}

else {

// Error running query

echo("Query error: " . odbc_errormsg($conn));

}

// Free the connection

@odbc_close($conn);

In this example, I’m using the SQL Server native ODBC driver which ships out of band from the operating system. Other driver choices may be used as outlined in the table below.

Item	Comments
Server	Name of the virtual SDS data server to connect to. This takes the form of *servername*.domain_name. In the example, I’m using a virtual server provisioned in the SDS pre-production domain data.dev.mscds.com
Driver	ODBC driver to use: {SQL Server} – Legacy SQL Server driver {SQL Native Client} – SQL 2005 Native Client {SQL Server Native Client 10.0} – SQL 2008 Native Client
Database	Name of the target database to connect to. If left unspecified the connection will default to the master database.
Encrypt	Force use of encryption over TDS – if left unspecified, SDS will force encryption
TrustServerCertificate	Trust the certificate returned by the data service – this is currently required due to implementation restrictions that will be relaxed before we release
UID	Username of the user – form should be user@server. Can be specified in the connection string or as argument to odbc_connect()
PWD	Password of the user account. Can be specified in the connection string or as argument to odbc_connect()

For those familiar with ODBC you’ll note this pattern is also used to connect to a regular SQL Server instance. The only change in the code is the name of the server, use of encryption and the use of SQL standard security (username and password).

In addition to the ODBC driver patterns, there is an open source Native PHP driver for SQL Server. This driver is a native client library built over the SQL 2005 Native Client. Today the driver requires the target SQL server support MARS. This prevents the driver from working with SQL 7.0, 2000 and SQL Data Services as MARS is not supported. The good news is that we’re working with the native driver folks to expose MARS as a configuration option; this support is already provided by the underlying ODBC driver. This change allows the use of the PHP Native driver with SDS without requiring SDS to support MARS.

In the end, you’ll see the patterns used to access SDS are identical to those you use to access SQL Server.

Nigel.

SSDS at PDC 2008

Soumitra Sengupta — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:53:00 GMT

It is around 40 days to PDC and the excitement is building. We have a ton of work to do between now and then and the team is heads down getting ready for this major event. If you look at the PDC 2008 breakout sessions already announced, it is incredible that we will have 26 sessions on Cloud Services and 6 sessions related to SQL Server Data Services (SSDS). You can look it up here. You can see Mike and Jennifer's interview with Amitabh Srivastava here, where he talks about some of the things his team has been working on. Unfortunately he cannot talk much about it, but I can assure you coming to PDC this year will be well worth it. In my mind this is as big and maybe bigger than when we announced the .Net wave. The cloud wave is a major event and disruption in our industry and you will get to see and hear from the guys driving this wave inside Microsoft at PDC 2008.

That is as much as I can say about our overall Cloud services initiatives. Specifically, as a member of the SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) team, I am psyched to say that we have scheduled 3 talks directly related to SSDS, 1 talk from our Technical Fellow Dave Campbell on how we are evolving and extending our comprehensive Data Platform and the fast growing SQL business to the cloud and another 3-4 talks on technologies like Astoria, Velocity, Sync Framework and Entity Frameworks that are important to our cloud strategy. So here are the key talks and a brief outline of what you can expect from these talks at PDC.

1. Microsoft SQL Server: Data-Driven Applications from Device to Cloud - Dave Campbell. Dave has been through it all. He will present the key trends that are shaping our industry and how we are evolving our Data Platform from devices, desktop, server to the cloud and the services that makes this platform worth betting on. If you ever wondered what software and services have to do with data, you do not want to miss this talk. Dave's talk will set the stage for all the talks to follow on data and tie them together. So this has to be a must attend talk for you if you care about data.

2. A Lap around SQL Server Data Services - Soumitra Sengupta. This will be an advanced technical presentation where I will explain how we got started on SSDS, how it relates to our Cloud and Data Platform strategy, how we see our Cloud services vis-a-vis our on-premises SQL Server offering. You will also learn why SSDS seems like a departure from hosted SQL Server. I get that one a lot. Tables, Columns, T-SQL anyone. I will fly through this material quickly and spend most of the time coding up an application using our REST and SOAP interfaces. I promise there will be one or two surprises during this presentation. I will also explain how we run our service and the trade-offs and questions that should be on developers' mind as they build applications using SSDS.

3. Under the Hood: Building SQL Server Data Services - Istvan Cseri and Gopal Kakivaya. Man what can I say. These guys are going to take the lid off SSDS and really dive under the hood and talk about how this service is built. If you want to see how to build a fault-tolerant, highly available multi-datacenter service, you cannot miss this talk. It will demystify what we have built and how we operate this. This is the first time we will go this deep. These guys are real rock stars and I will not be upset if you miss my talk BUT DO NOT MISS THIS ONE.

4. SQL Server Data Services: Futures - Patric McElroy. If you are curious after listening to the first 3 talks about where we are headed with SSDS, this is the talk for you. There will be lots of surprises as Patric will show you how we are thinking about extending our entire data platform and services to the cloud. This is a real forward looking session but there will be demos on the way to give you a clear idea of the vision and the path ahead.

In addition we will have lunch sessions, lounges, booth and Hand-on-Labs. You will get to meet, greet, ask questions and socialize with the team members who are making it all happen and if there is enough interest, we will try to get a group together and do something fun during PDC. So if you are interested let, David Robinson know. I know he is in touch with Mike Amundsen already about this.

Aside from these 4 talks, we have the following talks where we will establish the linkages between Sync, ADO.Net Data Services (Astoria), Velocity and other Microsoft services and SSDS. So it would be interesting for you to attend these as well.

1. Microsoft Sync Framework: Enterprise Data in the Cloud and on Devices - Liam Cavanagh
2. Microsoft Sync Framework Advances - Lev Novik
3. Developing Applications Using Data Services - Mike Flasko
4. Entity Framework Futures - Tim Mallalieu
5. Project "Velocity": A First Look - Murali Krishnaprasad
6. A Lap around Building Block Services - John Shewchuk
7. Architecture of the Building Block Services - Dennis Pilarinos, John Shewchuk

Obviously there will be the Keynote from Ray Ozzie to set the stage for this wave and you cannot miss that. I also hear Don Box and Chris Anderson are cooking up something using SSDS. These 2 guys have always lit up PDC and I do not think you will be disappointed this time around.

See you all there.

SQL Server Data Services Sprint 3 now Live

Soumitra Sengupta — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:18:00 GMT

We completed the rollout of Sprint 3 yesterday. The team is already half way into Sprint 4. In Sprint 4 we are focussed on things we need for PDC 2008, which by the way is in late October in Los Angeles. Ray Ozzie and Steve Ballmer foreshadowed some of what this PDC will be all about here and here. You can also go here to see the already announced sessions. SSDS will be a key part of this year's PDC. We set our technical and product agendas that developers care about at PDC. If you want to understand and learn what Services is all about in our Software plus Services strategy, do not miss this year's PDC.

Overall, this was an interesting deployment as we had new environments come online that had to be configured. The team worked really really hard to make the deployment as smooth as possible. Interestingly we did not hit any issues during deployment yesterday. Wish we could video tape how we do this and share with our readers. Something I have to take up with management. I think it will give everyone an appreciation of the amount of planning, tooling, automation and discipline that goes into these deployments.

Anyway as developers, you care about what new things we are enabling. Things have been leaked on this before by Roger, David Robinson and Jeff Currier. But here are the new features:

Blob Support via the REST interface

In this release, Blobs are limited to 100 megabytes in size.
Blob Support via the SOAP interface will be delivered in a later update.

Version metadata property has changed from a large integer to a container-wide dbtimestamp value:

Version numbers are now based on a dbtimestamp and will increase monotonically on a container-wide basis. No two entities in the same container will ever receive the same version value. The dbtimestamp increases monotonically, however not necessarily sequentially. Clients should no longer assume entity version numbers are sequentially assigned. It does not start at 0, but may be any non-zero integer value for a newly created entity.

ETag support via REST, with similar functionality provided on the SOAP interface

Support for If-Match and If-None-Match via the REST interface. This will allow you to verify that you have the latest version of an Entity, enabling you to use resources more efficiently.
Support for “Accept” header via the REST interface. This will allow you to denote what content you want returned from the service. For instance when retrieving a Blob, the “Accept” header will allow you to choose between the Blob content, or the metadata properties associated with it.
Support for ETag semantics on the SOAP service via the new Version Match object on the Scope object.

HEAD support via REST interface

Support for the “HEAD” verb via the REST interface. This provides a lightweight way of validating existing entity version information without requiring entire entities (or blobs) to be retransmitted to the client.

A new content type – “application/x-ssds+xml” – has been added to the service

This content type is for storing XML content in the service.
Existing “application/xml” content type is being phased out in a future sprint.
The "application/x-ssds+xml" content type should be used for all entities except those containing blob content. Blob entities should instead use a content type value which best reflects the type of blob data stored. It's important to note that the value chosen here will be used later when attempting to retrieve the different parts of an entity by using the "Accept" header.

In addition we did some infrastructure work to enable metering (we will be charging for this service some day :-)) ), throttling (DoS attacks happen and the service needs to work in degraded situation), quota enforcement etc. that developers will not see much of at this time. But once we open our management, debugging and monitoring interfaces, you will be able to plug in and keep up with what is going on with your service.

The primer is updated at our Dev Center here to help you take advantage of the new features. There is one other new "thing" that we are enabling in this rollout that we will talk about a bit later. It is not huge, but it will demonstrate that we are thinking about our building block services very very broadly and deeply. Stay tuned.

What is going on at SQL Server Data Services

kellyalt — Mon, 19 May 2008 21:20:00 GMT

The SSDS team is taking major steps this week and I thought of sharing the work we have done over the last 2 months with you, our readers. We announced our "restricted beta" at MIX 08 . The response was great and thank you all for your interest in SSDS. I am happy to say that we have been on-boarding registrants over the past 8 weeks and the pace has picked up over the past 3 weeks. You can argue that we are not doing this fast enough and some of us would agree with you. But the team wants to make sure that we provide our beta users with a great experience. It is hard to argue with that. Having said that, we are on our way to clear up the registration backlog. Thank you for your patience. If you have not registered yet but would like to register, please visit us at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/dataservices/default.mspx and click on the Register for Free Beta button and get yourself registered.

We promised to refresh SSDS every 8 to 10 weeks and I am happy to let you know that we are now in the middle of our second refresh since MIX 08. This is a big deal for us. Most of us cut our teeth building great client and server software. We are now learning how to build a great service. We are learning how to deliver new features every 8-10 weeks instead of every 24-30 months. We are learning how to keep our service up and running 24/7. So I am really proud that we landed everything we wanted to in our last sprint. Our operations team will be rolling out all that good work over the next few days. They did a great job rolling out the previous refresh (thanks Kyle, Tracy, Dustin and team) and I am confident that they will do it again. The product team is now in the middle of our next 8 week sprint. Planning is done, coding has begun and you can expect to see the results in another 8 weeks time. I feel great about how fast we have come up to speed on this new rythm of shipping and the amount of value getting added every sprint. You will hear about some of the new features we delivered in the last sprint once we complete our rollout. Stay tuned.

As part of this refresh, we now have the SQL Server Data Service Primer up on MSDN. Thanks to the product team and especially Mohan Vanmane who worked diligently with several people and teams across Microsoft to get this up on MSDN. Now it is up to you our customers and users to let us know how we can improve this primer and provide you with the information and guidance you need to build compelling applications for your customers.

Last but not the least, Nigel Ellis and Niraj Nagrani did a webcast on SSDS recently. Check it out at https://www106.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032376634&role=attend&pw=63B495CA. Just enter your name and press return and it will take you to the links for viewing the webcast. It will give you a good introduction to SSDS, the value propositions and how you can take advantage of it. Again, we would like to hear from you what you would like us to cover in future webcasts.

Thanks for your time.

Namashkar,
Soumitra Sengupta
Architect, SSDS

Istvan and Nigel talk about SSDS and data services in the Cloud

kellyalt — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:04:00 GMT

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.

Answering a few questions from Jeff's blog

kellyalt — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

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

Interesting post

kellyalt — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:39:00 GMT

Found this through David Robinson's blog. David is a Program Manager in the SSDS team and one of the first guys to write an application using SSDS. I do not know Max but I know what he is talking about. Thanks Max for explaining the value proposition of SSDS in a clear and concise manner.

Eugenio Pace discussses Litware HR Architecture

kellyalt — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 07:21:00 GMT

If you saw Nigel Ellis' "Introduction to SQL Server Data Services" presentation at MIX08, you will remember the Litware HR application that Nigel demonstrated. This application is built using the SSDS service by Eugenio Pace and members of his team. Eugenio discusses the architecture in his blog here and how he built this multi-tenant application here. He talks about the pros and cons of using SSDS. Good read. He promises to go deeper into how his team built the application and the challenges they faced. Look forward to hearing from you Eugenio. This feedback is very important to us as we build out SSDS. Thanks for the help.

When will we release the Technical Documentation?

kellyalt — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:46:00 GMT

I talked to our lead about this and we are working on releasing the technical documentation soon. Keep you eye on this blog as I will post it as soon as the documentation goes live.

Good post about SSDS Query Language

kellyalt — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:43:00 GMT

Ryan Dunn has a fairly detailed post on the SSDS query model here. Ryan has prototyped some application code already, so his description of the query model is worth a read.

Really good post from George Moore

kellyalt — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 07:54:00 GMT

Here is a really insightful post from George Moore from our Live Platform Services team tying all the announcements around data services from MIX08 together.

Watch Istvan explaining SSDS

kellyalt — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:04:00 GMT

Istvan was interviewed by Ryan Dunn about SSDS. Here is the video.