SQL Azure Team Blog : MIX08

On going quiet and transparency in the design process

Soumitra Sengupta — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:22:00 GMT

Roger has challenged us to be transparent as we design SQL Server Data Services. He has urged us couple of times to follow the process that the ADO.Net Data Services team has followed. First let me assert again that we are all in favor of an open process that gets the community and experts who want to provide guidance involved. Second I have seen the benefits of the open and transparent design process during my XML days and prior to that my open source days. So personally I am committed to being open and transparent.

Having said that, we are currently working under several constraints. SQL Server Data Services is only one part of a very broad and deep services initiative which will only come to full light at the upcoming PDC. While we want to be open and transparent, we want to make sure we do not disclose anything inadvertently. This limits the degrees of freedom we have when we discuss features we want to put in and designs for those features. I am very hopeful that post PDC, we will be progressively be more open about our features and design.

Regarding going quiet between sprints - this is the result of 2 separate issues. One our team was quite small till about March of this year. As the team has grown, we have lot of new people who are upto their eyeballs catching up and getting up the steep unlearning and learning curves of transitioning from software to a services mindset. This leaves us with very little bandwidth especially during sprints to engage in deep discussions. Second, this has been a very busy year starting with MIX, TechEd, Worldwide Partner Conference, TechReady and now PDC and TechEd EMEA for the team. To top it all, summers are usually slow time in Redmond as people tend to take their vacations during this time of the year. I was out of the country for 2 weeks with no access to cell phones or email. I am officially still on vacation. But this is an important topic of discussion in the forums and in the blog and I appreciate your concern. Just wanted to shoot this out to alleviate your concerns and request for some patience. PDC is only 2 months away and I urge that you all attend PDC and get the full scope of what is cooking, meet all the key people, share your concerns and ideas about software and services. This is a big wave and we cannot ride it without you. I promise it will be a fun, exciting and profitable ride for all of us.

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

Interesting take from Rick Negris over at AjaxWorld magazine

kellyalt — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:35:00 GMT

As Rick points out here, there are very few articles written about SSDS in the technical press. We did not want to make a lot of noise about this service at this time. This is an "invitation only" beta and the service is not generally released. While there has been some coverage, I found Rick's take quite interesting. Give it a read.

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.