SQL Server Data Services FAQ

SQL Server Data Service (SSDS) is a highly scalable and cost-effective on-demand data storage and query processing web service. It is built on robust SQL Server technologies and helps guarantees a business-ready service level agreement covering high availability, performance and security features. Microsoft SSDS is accessible using standards based protocols (SOAP, REST) for quick provisioning of on-demand data-driven & mashup applications.

SSDS is built on SQL Server database technologies, used for running mission-critical applications in the enterprise as well as on the Web. Since SQL Server is a broad data platform that can handle all data from birth to archival, there are many capabilities that our data platform provides. SSDS is exposing a subset of those capabilities and extending them as services in the cloud in ways that make it easy for customers and partners to consume and build upon over the Internet. Although SSDS in its first iteration exposes only a small subset of what is in the full SQL Server data platform, Microsoft expects this to increase over time, with likely features including binary large object columns, full text search, and richer data types.

Microsoft will also offer a library that will enable SSDS for on-premise SQL Server databases. This will enable businesses with the use of both on-premise data platform and services-based SSDS capabilities.

Customers can use SQL Server Data Services to store virtually any amount of data in the Cloud. They can query and modify data as required by the specific business scenarios. SQL Server Data Services support standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit. The primary wire format is XML. Developers and service providers can quickly run on-demand applications with ease. The data has flexible schema which can be modified dynamically by the application. The data is provided with high availability and reliability virtually anywhere, anytime.

Target Customers:

• Small to medium businesses looking to reduce their capital and operational cost of storing and maintaining high-volume data off-premise.
• Developers and Service providers hosting data-intensive and mashup on-demand applications with minimal infrastructure investments in security, availability and manageability.
• Enterprise customers building edge applications can collaborate on large or shared data sets.

Target Customer Scenarios:

• Archival data (e.g., aged data).
• Reference data (e.g., catalogs).
• Storing large amounts of structured or semi-structured data with a flexible schema definition or unstructured data with related structured metadata.
• Running applications that can tolerate data access latency across the Internet.
• Storing data that is naturally partitionable into disjoint data sets requiring little or no cross-correlations.
• Running applications that have limited or batched data access.
• Read-only or read-mostly data sets.
• Typical scenarios include business solutions like HR services, healthcare records management, data archiving and internet facing applications like social networking and picture sharing.

• Easy access with REST and SOAP protocols
• Flexible, WEB 2.0 friendly data model and wire format (XML and others) with query language
• Scale, with virtually no restriction on storage
• High availability, almost always available from any location
• Fast, reliable access, durable backup
• Easy to deploy solutions and modify user data
• Geo replication to help ensure business continuity
• Built on robust Microsoft SQL Server database technologies

We are taking registrations for the first service beta release scheduled in March 2008. Please register at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/dataservices. Upon registration you will receive an invitation code to join the beta program where you will have access to detailed documentation and sample code examples on how to immediately consume the service.

The service exposes SOAP and REST APIs which are functionally equivalent. Each interface allows the creation of authorities, containers, and the creation, update and deletion of single entities. You may also query the entities in your containers. The documentation of the beta service contains detailed examples on how to use the service interfaces in your application.

Developers will be able to use our simple, scalable, reliable and easy to program service for on-demand mashup type applications that work well with data in the Cloud. Service Providers and other partners will lower the cost of acquiring new customers by eliminating the cost of provisioning and operating the storage and switching to paying for data usage on demand. Both developers and partners can focus on innovating their business and minimize their infrastructure and management cost.

The SQL Server Data Storage Service can store multiple types of data, from birth to archival. Users can upload and query structured data, semi-structured data, stored in flexible entities, and unstructured data. Customers will be able to associate entities with large unstructured data objects (blobs) which could be accessed as URL addressable resources.

The service has been designed to store virtually any amount of data, limited only by users' needs. The data will be partitioned in order to scale to unlimited size. Each partition will be limited to a high size (10s of GB) in order to be processed on a single node of the cluster and to allow efficient replication and load balancing.

Data is stored in large storage clusters in various Microsoft data centers located across North America. We are planning to offer the service from international locations such as Europe and Asia. Users can group their data into authorities, which are affiliated with specific data centers and therefore provide control over the geographic location of the data.

The service will manage multiple copies of the data to help ensure high availability and reliability. The service will have a back-up of the data stored in each data cluster. Partitions are replicated to help achieve reliability. Geo-redundant data-copies help ensure business continuity.

The service is highly available and very reliable. It is built on Microsoft SQL Server relational database architecture that includes data protection, compliance, enterprise-level security features, real-time mirrored database replication, and high availability. We will provide a business-level SLA (service level agreement).

We will have some specifics on the pricing model later.

We plan to add support for notifying customers of service outages.

SQL Server Data Service supports the REST and SOAP protocols and is built to work with any customer applications. We will provide a great experience working with Microsoft products and development tools. In addition, we will provide support for development on other platforms and will invest in a strong development ecosystem around our service.

Microsoft SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) has been implemented to address on-demand storage, delivery and data processing requirements for on-demand hosted business applications. This enables customers of all sizes to deploy their applications either onto their own enterprise servers or into the Microsoft-run datacenters. Through investments like SSDS, BizTalk Services and ASP.NET services, Microsoft will deliver a new platform for businesses to exploit the full power of our on-demand services vision. Ultimately this will help provide developers and IT professionals with the flexibility to build and deliver applications faster and more cost effectively.