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Archive for the ‘SQL Server’ Category

SQL Server 2008 SP1 Released

Tagged as News, SQL Server

Quick news for the day, SP1 for SQL Server 2008 has been released and you can download it from here.

As with most service packs, its a roll up of all of the hot-fixes since RTM. There is nothing major in terms of new functionality, mainly just enhancements to the installation/un-installation process and Report Builder 2.0 which was initially shipped OOB.

Read more about it on the Data Platform team’s blog.

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Posted by Jeremy Boyd on 8 April 2009

Updates in the world of SQL Data Services

Tagged as SQL Server

If you have been interested in taking advantage of the cloud, then you will likely be interested in some news coming out of the SDS team. David Robinson has posted about some upcoming changes to SDS which brings on stream all of the SQL Server capabilities by allowing TDS (aka standard SQL Server protocol) access to connect to SDS from inside your Azure hosted application.

Full Relational Capabilities

So this brings on stream all of the standard SQL Server capabilities which most developers would be expecting and also really drops potential design constraints you might have been facing when looking at the much simpler ACE (Authority, Container, Entity) model which SDS previously offered.

IMHO this should really help drive adoption of Azure, and I’m hoping we will also see some tighter deployment capabilities getting released with the upcoming Azure CTP drops which will go a long way to allowing you to develop locally, deploy locally or deploy to the cloud without having to re-design the app to fit the environment. Good stuff!

So what about the ACE model?

From David’s post he suggests the ACE model will be discontinued over time – I suspect the Azure team will be keen enough to drop this as soon as is practical, but I believe if you still want to use the ACE model you can opt for the lower level Azure Table Storage approach. The other implication about the change is it would seem that the REST based API’s may also go away, or be replaced with Astoria based replacements sitting over SQL Server on Azure.

All in all a very promising move! It sounds like the first we will see of this will be around mid year, so we shall see how it all looks then. Of course we will be quite keen to get LightSpeed working well on the Azure hosting with this approach

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Posted by Jeremy Boyd on 11 March 2009