SQL Azure Federations
One of the coolest features in SQL Azure is Database Federations. Federations allow you to grow the power and size of your database in SQL Azure to an much larger scale than the largest single database allowed of 150Gig.
For an overview of SQL Azure federations you can watch this into video from Microsoft demonstrating what Federations are and how they are created and maintained.
Using Federations you increase not only your storage capacity, but also your computing power. Queries crossing multiple shards are distributed to the appropriate servers with the federation resulting in additional performance not possible without much work. Using Federation TSQL queries have much the same distribution of both work and data as are common in environments such as Hadoop utilizing Map/Reduce.
With SQL Azure Federation you now have the additional performance characteristics of a No-SQL distributed data technology combined with the ACID nature of a relational database without having to write your own sharding layer.
There are some tricks when using data returned from a Federation. Aggregates queries sometimes require additional work as the aggregates are executed on each individual participating database within the Federation.
In case you are wondering, Federations are not supported in any other version of SQL Server.
Follow this link for more detailed information on SQL Azure Federations.
Maurice writes in response to Yesterday’s editorial regarding no transactional backup capability in SQL Azure:
I knew that SQL Azure would not allow backups, I didn’t realize up to now it implies transactional backups too!
Even with a perfect always on setup, backups are necessary because humans operate on data and programs operate on data. Both can break it!
So having transactional backup is a must, it may save your life in case of data corruption due to bugs, misbehavior, stupidity or inattention.
A database system that doesn’t support this may solve some problems, but it is for niche applications (e.g. a central catalog repository) for which you can afford to have some replicate elsewhere. OLTP doesn’t suit very well with Sql Azure.
No amount of middle tier work can solve this problem at a lower price than having a full Sql Server version.
Are you using SQL Azure? Are you looking into it? What kinds of projects do you think fit this technology. Write in to btaylor@sswug.org with your comments.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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