SQL Azure Team Blog : TechEd

One more TechEd Video - The New Face of Microsoft SQL Data Services

davidrob — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:43:00 GMT

Here is one last video we filmed a few weeks back during TechEd. In this one, we discuss the new features of SDS including the development model, tools support, and how the services interoperate with the other building block services of the Azure Services Platform

The video can be found here

Scaling Out with SQL Data Services

davidrob — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:43:00 GMT

Hi Folks,

Here is another video from TechEd. In this one, Rick Negrin and I talk about scaling out your database with SQL Data Services and the performance gains you will see. The video can be seen here.

Enjoy!!!

Dave

The Role of a DBA with SQL Data Services

davidrob — Sat, 23 May 2009 20:04:00 GMT

Hi Folks,

Here is another Tech-Ed Online video. In this one, Rick and Zhongwei talk about the responsibilities of a DBA with SDS.

I hope you enjoy,

Dave

Provisioning an SDS Database

davidrob — Thu, 21 May 2009 02:00:00 GMT

The SDS team was extremely busy last week at TechEd North America in L.A.. We presented 3 sessions, recorded 4 TechEd online videos and spent a great deal of time speaking with customers.

Here is a video we did on what the provisioning experience will be like for SDS in the Azure Developer Portal. You can see the video here - Provisioning an SDS Database in the Azure Developer Portal

Enjoy!!!

Dave

SSDS Software Developer Kit (SDK) Beta Released on MSDN

Soumitra Sengupta — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:13:00 GMT

Just learnt from Mohan Vanmane that the SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) SDK Beta is now live on MSDN. You can get it from here. The documentation is available here. The SDK includes the command line tool and the SSDS Explorer that I demonstrated at TechEd 2008. These are beta version of the tools. So the team would appreciate if you can give it a spin and let us know what you like, what you do not like and above all file bugs that you see. I should mention that you do need a SSDS account to use these tools.

The team is seeking feedback that you can provide through our fourm here. Here is an excerpt from the email that the team sent out today:

"As we continue to build on our tools strategy, we would like to hear from you on how we could improve the developer experience when working with SSDS. The feedback we seek is primarily related to what tools and/or libraries would help you most when developing applications for SSDS. These can be targeted for development, data management, performance, debugging or any other area of SSDS for which you would like us to provide better support."

We appreciate all feedback.

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.

My TechEd 2008 Talk is now online

Soumitra Sengupta — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 02:30:00 GMT

I presented a talk titled "Introduction to Microsoft SQL Server Data Services" (DAT 251). You can view the session Introduction to Microsoft SQL Server Data Services in its entirety. I got the chance to share some details we have not had the chance to share yet. Roger Jenninngs posted a link as well here. He also included a short wish list. I have taken note and will let all of you know if and when we can post the code for the command line tool and the SSDS Management Studio demos that I showed during this presentation.

Best Practices series started

davidrob — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:16:15 GMT

Hi All,

Sorry for the cross posting, but I started a new blog series on my blog about SSDS best practices. This is aligned with the talks I gave at TechEd. You can find it here. Expect to see a new best practice about every week or so. If any questions pop up, just ask.

As usual, YOUR FEEDBACK DRIVES THE FEATURES OF SSDS. If there is something you need, just tell us :)

Dave Robinson

Sprint 2 goes live

kellyalt — Mon, 26 May 2008 19:53:00 GMT

Last week our Sprint 2 bits went live. We added several compelling features to our backend service, some of which will show up in the SSDS service in the upcoming Sprints. Key features added include:

a. Full text index and search
b. Multiple B-Trees - this will allow us to deploy schemas as we move toward supporting schemas in SSDS
c. Asynch queries - this will help in exposing fanout queries across multiple containers
d. Logging and tracing improvements to help us manage and debug the service efficiently
e. Backup and restore services
f. Improvements to our Distributed Data Fabric for failover and friendly swapping between primary and secondary partitions

One of the most satisfying part of Sprint 2 deployment was how long it took us to complete deployment. We cut the time taken to deploy and certify deployment by more than half. Kudos to our operations team led by Kyle Patton in achieving this.

Now on to Sprint 3. We are half way through Sprint 3 and the go/no-go is our next big milestone for this sprint. This is when the team will decide which improvements are looking good and will make it to deployment and which improvements we will have to postpone to the next sprint. The long weekend was a good break for all of us as things will get quite hectic as we prepare for TechEd (decks and demos will be locked down and ready to go). If you are at TechEd look us up as we will be presenting at the Developer as well as the IT Pro sessions.