What Can You Do With SQL Azure?
One of the biggest risks of SMB database operations is the hosting of data. SQL Azure has been designed to fill that gap. But, it comes with a cost. The cost isn’t monetary alone. You lose a lot of capability in order to gain the shared benefit of a non-dedicated machine just for you.
Think of SQL Azure as buying time on a shared resource. You purchase band width, disk resources (up to 150 gig per database) and CPU capacity for your systems. You have limited control over where your database is maintained…it is in the Database Cloud and completely managed by SQL Azure. Azure is responsible to make sure your database stays online, fails over if needed, throttle you back if you are using too many resources or connections, and keep things generally healthy.
As a result of this zen like cloud where everything just works, they have not come up with a way for your database to do many of the things it did before. For example, since you have zero access to the file system, you are unable to perform any backups of any sort. Not even transactional backups. You have no control over database files that are created enabling efficiency techniques such as partitioned tables.
Since databases are restricted in size, Azure recommends sharding your data, but, unlike partitioned tables, the engine does not federate data as a single point of query. This means if your data is separated across more than one database your client layer is responsible to join/union etc. all data from multiple sources. No heterogeneous capabilities are available. Why does Azure work this way? It really makes sense when you think of SQL Azure as a Cloud Service. You have no idea where your data is stored. You simply ask Azure to connect to your database and it performs the appropriate routing.
A well designed middle tier can readily handle many of the restrictions of the SQL Azure data engine. Middle tier code Operating in the Azure Cloud can scale easily to handle the load it will now assume. Many systems today are not written in this fashion.
Are you using SQL Azure yet? It’s a great product, and the cost of the service, when you consider hardware, support, bandwidth and everything altogether, it is definitely something you should review. Have you been able to deploy or design a new system using SQL Azure? Why not drop me a note with your experience to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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