At SQL PASS Summit 2011, Microsoft announced a number of upcoming improvements to SQL Azure including larger databases, Federation, improved management portal, better collation support and more; all to be available by the end of 2011.
The new features that were announced are -
- Higher database size limit for individual databases - 150 GB instead of the current limit of 50 GB
- Federation – to allow easy scale out of data to multiple databases using the sharding pattern
- Improved management portal with new features for easy monitoring of databases, drill-down into schemas, query plans, spatial data, indexes/keys and query performance statistics
- Expanded support for user-controlled collations (SQL Azure Database currently does not allow setting the collation at the server or database level)
Some of these features, such as Federation, are already available in CTP currently. Microsoft also announced new CTP releases for SQL Azure Reporting and SQL Azure Data Sync. You can read more details about the features introduced in these CTPs on InfoQ and in this blog post.
SQL Azure is Microsoft’s relational database-as-a-service offering and a part of the Windows Azure platform. Although there are a lot of similarities between SQL Server and SQL Azure, the latter has been written ground up to work in the cloud and has features such as high availability and fault tolerance along with triple replication of data.
Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Summit is a conference presented for the SQL Server Community. This year’s summit saw a lot of interesting tracks especially about SQL Azure, which can be accessed here and here.