SQL Azure Team Blog : Relational Capabilities

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.

The no spin details on the new SDS features

davidrob — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:50:00 GMT

Today we announced the details of our plans to accelerate the delivery of core relational database features as part of SDS. There has been quite a bit of buzz about SDS over the past couple weeks and it is great to be able to share the details more broadly.

If we flash back about a year ago to Mix 08, Nigel Ellis got up on stage to introduce the community to SDS which, at the time, was a flexible entity based cloud database that you accessed using standard internet protocols. We made this announcement with the promise that more relational capabilities would be coming - and they did. But the universal feedback we received from our TAP partners and other early adopters was the need for a relational database delivered as a service. This was extremely valuable feedback and drove us to more aggressively investigate ways in which we could deliver these features. As a result of that work and based on the progress we’ve since made in the product team, we are announcing that SDS will deliver full relational database capabilities as a service.

While we knew we needed to accelerate our plans we also knew we needed to hold true to some on the founding principles we had when we started our journey. Things like High Availability, Fault Tolerance, Friction Free Provisioning, Pay As You Grow Scaling, Immediate Consistency. We are still delivering on these promises and have added to the mix true relational capabilities, T-SQL and compatibility with the existing developer and management tools ecosystem.

What does this mean for developers? Developers will be able to very easily provision themselves a logical server and database and begin developing against it immediately using the existing tools and technologies that they are accustomed to. We are providing an experience where a developer can take an existing application and just change the connection string to point it to the cloud and have it just work.

How will we do it? Three letters TDS. TDS stands for Tabular Data Stream and it's the published protocol that clients use to communicate with SQL Server. From its inception, SDS has always been built on the SQL Server technology foundation and it just made sense to allow our users to access their data via TDS. Most importantly for developers, this means symmetric SQL Server functionality and behavior combined with compatibility with the existing tools you are familiar with.

Tables?...Check

Stored Procedures?...Check

Triggers?...Check

Views?...Check

Indexes?...Check

Visual Studio Compatibility?...Check

ADO.Net Compatibility?...Check

ODBC Compatibility?...Check

To be clear, the above is not a complete list of supported features. However, given the feature set we are planning to support in SDS v1, a majority of database applications will “just work”, allowing developers to target on and off-premises deployments with essentially the same code base. The initial scenarios we are targeting are things like web and departmental applications. We will be posting some content to our MSDN Dev Center in the coming weeks with specifics and getting started guidance but I encourage everyone to download SQL Express and the Windows Azure SDK to get started.

The core foundational components of SDS have not changed. This is still the same architecture that we have been telling you about for the past year and that underlies the current CTP bits. It is the same architecture that is powering some of Microsoft's key service properties and in the next few months will be used to store 100’s of terabytes of data in production deployments. Our early adopters (both internal and external) have shaken it down pretty well and we feel very confident about these bits. The only difference is we are now providing a rich SQL model while maintaining the high availability, fault tolerant and scale aspects of the system.

What about the ACE (Authority, Container, Entity) data model and developer experience? Since Windows Azure storage has a similar data model (property bag) and developer experience, we will stop supporting the current ACE Model sometime in the future. Does this mean you can't access your relational data via internet friendly protocols like REST? Not at all. You can still access your relational data (located on premises or in the cloud) via HTTP/REST using the ADO.Net Data Services framework. The compatibility with existing tools and technologies is a really important point to drive home and a super important value add that Microsoft provides.

Breadth and OSS developer support will continue to be a high priority for us and we will continue to support and provide breadth development libraries for all mainstream development technologies including PHP, Ruby and Java. If it works with SQL Server, it will largely work with SQL Data Services.

What about Security? All communications with our service is SSL encrypted and our initial authentication will be using SQL Authentication.

Of course, SQL Data Services remains one of the key developer services of the Azure Services Platform - that hasn't changed. Consuming SDS from within an Azure application has never been easier and we will continue to ensure this is a feature rich, friction-free experience.

I have said a lot, so go ahead and digest all of this. What else do you want to know? As I am sure you all have more questions, feel free to email me at david.robinson@microsoft.com and I'll post the questions and answers for all to see.