Reaching For The Clouds With SSDS -- Visual Studio Magazine

Data Driverby David Ramel

Reaching For The Clouds With SSDS

If you're a database developer, you may be wondering how SQL Server Data Services will affect how you build data-driven applications. SSDS is Microsoft's cloud-based repository that is available for testing through the company's community technology preview program.

When it comes to Microsoft's emerging cloud strategy, Microsoft is giving a lot of airplay to SSDS because it epitomizes the company's mantra that enterprise customers are most likely to adopt the hybrid approach to premises and cloud-based services, which it calls "software-plus-services."

To be sure, Microsoft is not currently targeting SSDS for transaction-oriented applications, though if you are developing or administering OLTP applications, SSDS could become a repository for referential and/or backup data.

But of all the new data-driven technologies Microsoft is offering these days, SSDS will be viewed as the simplest, according to Jim Williams, an account architect at Microsoft. Williams gave a session on SSDS at VSLive! New York last week.

"You're not going to write SQL against SQL Server Data Services," Williams said. "You are not going to see tables, you are not going to see foreign keys, you're not going to see the concept of referential integrity that you are used to."

Among some questions Williams addressed in his session:

Will SSDS support transactions?
There's no transaction semantics in this offering today. There certainly could be one in the future... Since a SOAP interface is supported, it would certainly be possible to offer Web services transactions.

If it doesn't need a SQL interface, what's on the client?
Any technology that knows how to do SOAP or REST. The samples in the documentation cover Ruby, Java, and C#.

How do will developers write queries against SSDS?
If you know LINQ, you know more than you need to make queries against SSDS the way it is today.

If you're interested in SSDS, you won't want to miss the detailed TechBrief by Roger Jennings, principal with OakLeaf Systems, which is in the current issue of Redmond Developer News.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/15/2008

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