Jon Udell cURL's with SQL Server Data Services

Soumitra Sengupta — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 03:31:00 GMT

Just read Jon Udell's post on SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) here. Happy to hear that Jon was able to explore SSDS with cURL "within minutes of cracking open the SSDS documentation". Readers who are wondering what Jon is talking about, should read Jeff Currier, one of the guys writing real code that we ship in SSDS, talking about using cURL to explore SSDS here.

When few of us crazies started thinking of SSDS, a non-negotiable requirement was that developers should be able to start exploring and using the service quickly. There is so much going on in the cloud services space that if it took too long to experiment with a new service, we were afraid that developers will put it on the shelve and may never give it a spin. I know I do not like to spend months on something to see if I would use it. It was hard for us to "cover up" the SQL Server heritage of SSDS, but we argued that simplicity is a virtue that we should aspire to.

Jon hits on an interesting point when he says 'while the novelty of “just coding to a URL” on a Microsoft platform will undoubtedly attract some tirekickers who otherwise wouldn’t show up, the real draw will be the ability to exercise choice along the whole continuum'. Internally we use the words "reach" and "rich". We believe that to be a platform with large adoption, one needs to provide both "reach" (so that people from all other platforms can use you) as well as "richness" (so that people who use your platform exlusively have a rich set of tools to leverage). Today it is easy to see that SSDS is aiming to "reach" as many developers as possible. To do this we have to address "the continuum of access styles". Jon seems to be saying that we are meeting that goal. What do you think? Are we close? Are we way off base? Or we should not worry about the "continuum of access styles".

It will be interesting to hear from you all.

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.

SQL Azure Team Blog : Tools

Jon Udell cURL's with SQL Server Data Services

SSDS Software Developer Kit (SDK) Beta Released on MSDN