Microsoft places SQL data service up in the ‘cloud’
March 17, 2008 —
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LAS VEGAS — Anyone who listened intently enough at MIX08 would have noticed that Microsoft’s laser focus on Silverlight 2 was, at one point, obscured by clouds. Cloud computing, that is—and an upcoming Web-based data server that the company calls SQL Server Data Services (SSDS).
SSDS may have been the sleeper announcement of the show, and for now, it’s a working part of the company’s cloud computing initiative. Microsoft describes SSDS as an on-demand data storage and query processing utility service, which is hosted in the company’s data centers. The company already offers BizTalk Services and file storage as cloud services.
The advantage, of course, is that one’s data is backed up and made geo-redundant, replicated to several locations around the world. Microsoft will provide a Service Level Agreement—with latency figured in—for customers when SSDS becomes generally available.
But it appears that won’t be for a while, and a vague commitment to “next year” means data managers will spend several quarters with their noses pressed against the candy store window. A beta test of the service went live March 5 at the start of MIX08 and is being provided to a select and undisclosed group of testers. The final version may ship in the second half of 2009, according to Tudor Toma, a group program manager in SQL Server group.
The scope of what SSDS can do today is limited, the company admits: one can add, delete or modify data, and run basic queries against it. Toma said that Microsoft would update the production version of SSDS in two-month increments.
The first update to SSDS after it initially becomes generally available will add support for binary large objects, or BLOBs, and full text indexing.
David Mitchell Smith, a Gartner fellow and vice president, compared SSDS to Amazon's SimpleDB, a Web service designed to run queries on structured data. Even still, an understanding of SSDS may confound some, because in many ways the lack of details from Microsoft makes it easier to say what SSDS isn’t.
Related Search Term(s): Cloud computing, Microsoft, SQL
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