Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Microsoft Announces SQL Server Data Services

What is Microsoft SQL Server Data Services?
SQL Server Data Service (SSDS) is a highly scalable and cost-effective on-demand data storage and query processing web service. It is built on robust SQL Server technologies and helps guarantees a business-ready service level agreement covering high availability, performance and security features. Microsoft SSDS is accessible using standards based protocols (SOAP, REST) for quick provisioning of on-demand data-driven & mashup applications.

How does Microsoft SQL Server Data Services differ from traditional on premise relational SQL Server Database?
SQL Server Data Services is a storage and query processing utility providing mega scale, high availability, reliability, and geo-distributed data services in the Cloud. Customers use the service on-demand, with no up-front cost. It eliminates the initial investment in hardware and software and the on-going cost for storage administration, scale maintenance. Developers and Service providers can quickly run their on-demand applications with minimal infrastructure cost.

What can I do with SQL Server Data Services?
Customers can use SQL Server Data Services to store virtually any amount of data in the Cloud. They can query and modify data as required by the specific business scenarios. SQL Server Data Services support standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit. The primary wire format is XML. Developers and service providers can quickly run on-demand applications with ease. The data has flexible schema which can be modified dynamically by the application. The data is provided with high availability and reliability virtually anywhere, anytime.

Rest of the FAQs here: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/dataservices/faq.mspx
Main SQL Server Data Services site here: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/dataservices/default.mspx

5 comments:

Dave Mc said...

This is clearly great news for the Ajax and mash-up crowd. But what about businesses like mine who have developed a complex desktop application using C# on SQL Server? We would love to be able to offer a version of our product that stores data in the cloud (perfect for smaller customers who lack a proper IT infrastructures). SDSS seems ideal for this purpose. But I really don't fancy re-coding the whole storage layer in our product to make REST requests, nor do I want to convert it all to LINQ because this ties us to newer versions of the .NET framework. So will Microsoft ship an ADO.NET provider for SDSS that will look like a regular SQL Server from above but do all the REST stuff under the hood?

Dave Mc said...

And of course wherever I wrote 'SDSS' in my previous comment you should read 'SSDS'. Only two coffees so far this morning...

JamieT said...

AHA! its YOU Denis :)

I did wonder why all your posts kept showing up twice on my reader.

Denis said...

jamie, yes its me. on sqlblog.com I am trying to be more serious, I post some simple or non sql related stuff on this blog also which I don't do there :-)

Denis said...

Dave, I am sure that MS will come of with some conversion tool of some sort to ease the pain