SQL Azure Federations is open for business!

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Wooohooowwwy!

Finally the day arrives! The year end update to SQL Azure is live and you can now use federations across all geographies of SQL Azure. There also a great new surprise we have been working on; we are making Federations available through open specification promise. OSP (open specification promise) is a promise not to assert patents against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation that conforms to a Covered Specification. You can find the full definition here. This simply means that anyone in the open source community or in commercial development business can freely utilize the federations model in your libraries and utilize the same runtime model for representing distribution of data in your partitioning implementations. OSP for federations bring great interoperability and openness to the federations model. You can find more details on Ram’s blog here about details of the SQL Database Federations OSP.

Well, if you would like to get started, there are many how-tos and walk-throughs. here are a few links that will help;

There are also a few chats and demos I have recorded over the last few weeks to help get you started on federations;

We are obviously not done yet with federations. There will be more content, updates to the technology and other exciting news. Simply look for #sqlfederations in twitter or come to my blog regularly for updates.

Cihan Biyikoglu - Program Manager SQL Azure

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 12, 2011
    Cihan,Congrates on the RTW of SQL Azure Federations. Great work from your entire team.--rj
  • Anonymous
    December 12, 2011
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    December 13, 2011
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    December 13, 2011
    This is great feature, but pricing model seems to be broken from what I can see making it not very useful for SAAS.
  • Anonymous
    December 13, 2011
    Question - Having issues with having federation and aspnet_Membership in the same database?  Getting errors that you can't have Identity in a federated database?  Also in Azure it is creating items in a system-unique identifier database and not in the regular database when scripting tables with federation.  Any pointers?
  • Anonymous
    December 14, 2011
    Is this still true:  ALTER TABLE does not provide a way to alter tables created with the FEDERATED ON clause.If so, how in the world are we supposed to deploy schema changes?
  • Anonymous
    December 15, 2011
    Hi Gunnar, We do support ALTER TABLE on all tables however we do not support a FEDERATED ON clause in the ALTER TABLE statement. So you cannot demote and promote a table to be federated or reference table with a single ALTER TABLE statement but we did not find that type of change to be very common among our users. What is your use case for doing ALTER TABLE with FEDERATED ON?
  • Anonymous
    December 15, 2011
    Hi Craig, would love to hear what you'd like to see changed with federation billing model. You can email me at cihan.biyikoglu@microsoft.com.
  • Anonymous
    December 15, 2011
    Hi DE, we do not support identity property in federation members right now. We are looking at relaxing that in future. Now sure about the second question; could you expand on the details? you can email me at cihan.biyikoglu@microsoft.com.Thanks