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RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

Robert DeFazio — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:52:48 GMT

Timothy,I agree with you in this regard. Data lacking any personal character, any possibility for compromising the physical or intellectual property of a business or other human institution, or any implications for national security would be best distributed via the cloud. It is bigger and more available. I think the sticking point is simply where humans would take umbrage at the disclosure of any particular piece of information. Admittedly, this is a more general philosophical question than it is technical. In certain nations, the disclosure of some of the finer details of life is regarded as perfectly acceptable. In a recent article it was disclosed that the salaries of all employees in Norway are a matter of public record and freely available on the Internet. Here in the United States one's previous record as a child predator or sexual criminal would be accessible on the web. In ancient Judaism the Pharisees, roundly criticized by Jesus and the early Christians, did what they called "building a fence around the Law." Their belief was that if one constructed a set of rules that were more restrictive than the Law of divine origin, then the Law would never be violated if everyone would observe the more stringent manmade law, hence the reference to the "fence" around the Law. In many ways ISO standards, HIPPA requirements, best practices of the IT world, and much of the corpus of Federal and state law and regulation follow the same Pharisaic logic. It is commonly thought that if the fence is high enough, and everyone follows the rules, no harm will occur. As we all know, however, there are those in the world that love nothing better than scaling manmade walls and fences to see what is on the other side, which brings to the fore the insight that laws and regulations are designed for those who will respect them. For the criminally inclined they are utterly irrelevant since laws and regulations are just words on paper, and they have no inner drive to participate in the social contract that says everyone has to play by the same rules. That is where the technologists of the world find their socially significant niche. By making it supremely difficult to for cyber sociopaths to break through the barriers to access to information and physical assets, they become the cyber guardians of the planet. It is in that role of being a digital champion that IT professionals gain a dignity not often afforded to them by those who have found it ever so convenient to label them as "geeks." Living up to that calling is something that a surprisingly large number of IT professional strive to do, and it speaks volumes about the quality of the people that the profession attracts. Having worked at one point in time as an officer of a stock brokerage company, I can say that the level of professionalism and personal and business ethics of the IT world stands head and shoulders above that of the financial services world. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the financial rewards were accordingly rearranged to reflect that reality?

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

timothyawiseman — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 09:31:43 GMT

Robert, I think that it would be wise to treat all but the most generic of customer information, and certainly anything personally identifiable, as at least somewhat sensitive.However, there is a lot of work with large datasets that are not about individual people or money at all. For instance, some scientific research can deal with large datasets where the need to protect the dataset itself may be at least relatively low. For instance, I suspect much work on the genome of the drosiphila fruit fly or other fields in bioinformatics would fall into this category. In such an instance, it may make a lot of sense to use Cloud services, especially if collaboration with colleagues that were geographically separated were required.

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

Robert DeFazio — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:58:46 GMT

Sam,The points you make with respect to the convenience of using the cloud as a mechanism for continuous, 24/7 operation and distribution of data to business partners are compelling from an IT operations point of view, but the assumption that large companies have thought out the legal ramifications of doing so is not necessarily valid. For data-centric companies or companies whose primarly line of business it is to manipulate and/or sell data, yes, it is likely that they have at least considered the possibilities of litigation as a result of cloud computing for more than a brief moment. The kinds of companies that I would expect would have considered such would be companies like Microsoft, DataQuick, MSNBC, Google, and the like. Notice that these are largely companies that produce cyber products or products that are used primarily to manipulate and shape data.Companies that I would suspect have only given passing attention to these issues would be small to medium size companies that produce tangible products or that deliver services. Why? Their economic position is not as strong as that of global companies and they are far more concerned about making the sale as the first order of business. In such companies, marketing and sales departments carry far greater weight, relatively speaking, than their counterparts in global companies. This is not to say that global companies are slouches when it comes to seeking and closing deals; rather it is to say that the degree of influence that those departments in smaller companies have over fundamental business decisions is greater as a result of economic need. I see significant hazards in making the assumption that if Microsoft uses and promotes the cloud, it must be okay because they wouldn't use and promote it if it were legally hazardous. For companies with a physical global presence and which have enormous budgets, dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's is feasible because of the capital they can throw in to protect their interests while at the same time engaging in and promoting cloud computing. Large global companies maintain parallel data paths, one for day-to-day operations and the other for legal protection. They categorize e-mail messages as they arrive, sort and archive each version of a document, make referential copies of each published press release and publicly released document, and take many other steps to ensure that in the case of litigation, there is a complete library of everything the company has ever said, published, or done so that an overwhelming presentation can be made in court to defend their interests. They have an army of in house attorneys and outside retained counsel to represent them and to verify periodically that they are continuing to keep up the archival processes that will result in their prevailing in litigation. Doing so consumes an enormous amount of money, far more than the entire annual collective budgets of multiple small nations. Companies of the scale of IBM and Microsoft, as influential as they are on business and government, however, neither employ most of the world's workers nor produce most of a nation's GDP. The big players in both regards are the aggregate of small companies world wide that employ the vast majority of people and produce most of each nation's GDP. Companies of this smaller scale lack the budgets to sustain the kind of protective efforts that a company like Google would perform. What this simply means is that what is safe for Microsoft is not necessarily safe for a 100 employee company that manufactures fuel pumps for the automobile industry. They don't have the same mindset, economic advantage, legal staff, or budget to do so. If, therefore, they tread out into the cloud in order to reduce business costs and complexity, they do so without the expensive armor that global companies put on before taking the same steps, resulting in a far more hazardous adventure into cyberspace.Let me give an actual example of the kind of thinking that goes on when entities consider moving to the cloud. Recently, the City of Los Angeles, faced with a budgetary crisis of historic proportions, was approached by Google and offered its cloud computing services. Google had already brought the Washington, D.C. into its cloud computing fold, so the Los Angeles city council wondered out loud if such an arrangement should be considered as well for itself. After all, if Washington did it, why not L.A.? What the city was considering putting into the cloud were tax records and police databases. Its confidential database of gang member affiliations, strategies and scenarios for breaking up gangs and criminal organizations, pending actions, personnel records, and the like would all be out in the cloud. Does that sound like good, legally defensible planning, or does it sound like someone only listening to the ringing of the cash register?Breaking into a computer system isn't all that difficult. We have all heard of the Nigerian e-mail scam, phishing attempts on the part of Israeli and Russian cyber criminals, identity theft of credit card numbers, and a long list of largely untraceable criminal activities that have occurred over just the past five years, and the impression one has from the reports of these activities is that such invasions of corporate and personal privacy result from spyware, hacking, or breaking unbreakable computer security. In fact, most successful thefts of information result from errors of human judgment. A person calls a data center claiming his is John Jones in sales engineering, that he is out of the office at a customer site and wants to show a customer a spreadsheet on his workstation, but he just changed his password and can't recall it. So he asks, "Could you [the support desk attendant] give me a new password so I can complete the demo?" Even simpler, is to physically call on a company claiming to represent a firm that has the world's best widget that will make the company lots of money and costs virtually nothing. You get a tour of the facilities, and as you stroll through the operations area, you notice that someone has posted his password on a sticky note attached to his monitor (there is always someone in every company that does this). You pause and make pleasant conversation with that person and learn his name from the business cards sitting on his desk. Later, when you try to enter the system remotely, you try various user names based on the name of the person you spoke with and just add the password. Eventually, you gain access to everything that person can see, and it is often surprising just how large the corpus of information is that each person in a company can see as a result of the company being "customer-driven." The information includes customer names, addresses, account numbers, methods of payment, last purchases, lines of credit, tax ID numbers, notes about the dealings with the customer including personal information about family members (birthdays and anniversaries).Now, imagine that the data is located in a part of the world where the prevailing regional attitudes toward data privacy are not those that we embrace. Google has more than 23 world wide data centers spread across the globe operating under the laws of at least a half dozen or more countries and employing foreign nationals. In some cases, the data centers are simply computers set up in leased space in existing facilities owned and operated by non-Google entities. To the extent that the people who actually put their hands to the keyboards in those facilities do not share our understanding of the words "confidential" and "private," we are exposing our business, government, and personal data to theft.The unfortunate truth is that because of the way that we as people choose to do business in order to appear to be approachable and friendly, we greatly enhance our likelihood of leaking information that can come back to bite us very hard. When we choose to conduct business in the same way within the environment of cloud computing where the data stored, from a legal point of view, has diminished privacy privileges to begin with and when we as business enterprises are not prepared either from a psychological or economic perspective to undertake the considerable additional measures to protect our legal and financial interests from the hazards of cloud computing, it creates a scenario that increasingly resembles playing Russion roulette. From he perspective of a small business, using cloud computing tools seems like such a no-brainer. It's cheap, easy to use, doesn't require us to do updates or maintenance, and it's accessible from every branch office we could ever want to open. In a perfect world, all that is true,and it looks like a gift wrapped in pretty paper and tied up in a ribbon. In the real world, however, where people get sued, where people steal, where business ethics are constantly challenged, and where budgets tend to define what companies think they "ought" to do, all that is still true, but it is wrapped in caveats that are a mile thick and tied up with barbed wire.

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

OCTom — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:54:17 GMT

Thanks for this timely article. I volunteered to invetigate Azure for my organization and this article will definitely aid that.I doubt that all of our databases will be in the cloud. We have HIPAA requirements and no one is excited about putting the data governed by HIPAA on the web. However, we have several databases where it may make sense to store them in the cloud.It's something we're looking at but I don't know that we'd be putting anything in the cloud before 2011.

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

Simon_L — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 03:38:30 GMT

Robert, as Timothy mentioned yours is a well thought answer that certainly illuminates issues witht he cloud I had never considered ...My only question concenring the points you raise would be surely the larger players etc would have considered the legal ramifications, especailly the issues concerning the Data Protection Act etc and would have factored that into their plans (one would at least hope) And yes I do tend to agree... its a new name for an old concept kind regards~si

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

SQL-DBA — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 03:16:56 GMT

The case for data in the cloud is strongest for global companies that require near constant uptime. You can't say let's do maintenance at 3 AM like you do in the States, because 3 AM is smack in the middle of the day for other parts of the World.There is also a huge advantage for companies that need to offer access to data to external partners. The whole process of creating VPN tunnels, opening ports, etc. is no longer the sys admins nightmare.And let's not forget the time and effort it takes to put purchase, install and configure hardware and SQL Server, then take care of the day-to-day patch management, tuning, etc.I am not saying to put medical records, credit cards, SSNs on SQL Azure but there are MANY use cases where data can be hosted in the cloud with zero risk.

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

Robert DeFazio — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:46:19 GMT

Timothy,I think the cloud has a role for any company that deals with the public through the Internet. In fact, if you have a website, you are in the so-called "cloud." We, however, also have to live in the real world where attorneys and courts can deep six a company in nothing flat depending on how pathetic a picture they paint of the suffering of an alleged victim of corporate misdeeds. The cloud could be used for non-sensitive information, but what information in a company qualifies for being non-sensitive information? Let's say that a customer sees something on a website that induces him to buy a product. Later, the product proves to be defective, and in the course of using it, the customer is injured seriously. He hires an attorney who requests production of a copy of the website page upon which the customer relied to make the purchase. You, the company representative have reviewed the copy of the page as it existed at the time of the customer's purchase, and you note that due to a mistaken sentence on the page, it could be understood why the customer went ahead with the purchase. On another page that existed at the time of the purchase more explanatory material detailed the hazards of using the product, but on the page in question, the wording would suggest to some that the company concealed a hazardous flaw. From a legal strategy point of view, delaying the production of the web page in electronic format would be to your advantage and could spare your company millions of dollars in a court judgment, especially if your attorney is successful in obtaining a settlement before the case goes to trial. Unfortunately, the page is archived in a database located in the cloud, so opposing counsel simply subpoenas the digital version of the page from the hosting company, forcing your hand prematurely.The cloud existed before it became fashionable to give it a name. In the 1980s, there were computer bulletin boards. In the 1990s, there was the seminal Internet. In the early part of this decade, there were application service providers (ASPs), and now this continuous presence has a name...the "cloud." It is not new, however. It is the same thing it has always been, namely an aggregation of service providers who offer to give companies and individuals the capacity to perform work with sophisticated software and tools at prices lower than those if they had to buy them outright. Insofar as the spectrum of services is concerned and the multiplicity of their uses, what we have now is certainly much better than what existed in 1980, but what is lacking is the common business sense that asks the question, "Is it wise to put certain kinds of information into the hands of people we cannot control directly, especially when we know that once the information is public, it cannot be retracted?"That was why I said in my earlier post that an attorney should be involved in the inner group of persons in a company that determine how data is backed up and preserved. Minds that are engaged in other areas of business operations need to have a say in how data is used, where it is used, and how it is preserved. The IT world has always been a kind of glass ceiling world. Even within software companies, the people who are responsible for managing the servers that control workers' e-mail and house the databases used in the process of creating software never tend to rise into the inner circles of company management. The natural tendency of people is to reach for either money, power, or both. When money doesn't come easily, power is the next ring to reach for, so it is not at all surprising to see CTOs and CIOs build small fiefdoms out of their departments. Decisions are often made that do not necessarily comport with the objectives of general management, decisions such as putting the e-mail addresses of company personnel on websites, providing glowing testimonials about the educational background of the company president and his family and how the company is a family-owned business. Now, let's suppose that information is put into the cloud, and an old rival of the president from his college days who has nursed a grudge against him since then happens to come across the information. He lays a trap for him and attempts to harm him physically, resulting in severe injury. The president's wife, after the shock of it all wears off, calls her attorney and sues the company for negligently exposing her husband and family to grave risks and emotional distress. $10 million later, the court case is over, the company is defunct, and the data is still in the public domain called the "cloud."Good judgment is what spells the difference between a successful business leader and a flop. Good judgment is what is missing in most businesses, and when it is missing in a company with an active IT department, disaster is only a few short steps away.So, yes, there is a place for the cloud, but it like a loaded revolver can either be an effective tool in warding off assailants or an instrument producing a self-inflicted wound. The difference between the two cases is the wisdom of the person that handles it.

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

timothyawiseman — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:09:34 GMT

Robert DeFazio, I am truly impressed with your answer. It seems well thought out and researched. But you seem to see no value in the Cloud whatsoever. As an individual, I make use of certain select Cloud services. As a DBA, I currently do not make use of any cloud base databases professionally, but I could see a niche for them, especially when dealing with data that was not particularly sensitive. Do you think there is any room for Cloud services alongside more traditional approaches?

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

timothyawiseman — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:06:13 GMT

[quote][b]GRE-452109 (10/22/2009)[/b][hr]How do we think the Cloud will affect the 'employability' of the DBA?Do we think it will reduce the amount of DBA jobs available? (as a results of adavantage 'Free from administrative headaches?')does the cloud mean and end to the DBAs Job?[/quote]The short answer is no.First, for several reasons a lot of data will not migrate to the cloud. The Cloud certainly has a place, and I make extensive use of certain services, but there are some things that for a variety simply will not fit there for the forseeable future. For one thing, if the database is anything truly mission critical than many executives are leery of loosing control over it. For another, use of the cloud does bring up privacy and security issues that can be challenging to work out if the data is at all sensitive. And finally, there is the loss of, at least in some cases, the ability to fully customize the service. Even with data that does fully migrate to the cloud, in most organizations the DBA is the person most knowledgeable in terms of properly structuring it and protecting the logical integrity of the data. So, in that situation the DBA may shift more towards a Development DBA/Data Arhitect but there will still be plenty of room for the DBA.

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

Robert DeFazio — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:36:21 GMT

This is not just a United States issue; it is global. European law is far more restrictive than the United States with respect to what is private and what is not, and as companies become global in their scope, they wil have to contend with a wide range of privacy regulations.

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

Robert DeFazio — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:28:44 GMT

Incidentally, I work in the IT industry. My truly little company focuses on reclaiming e-mail privacy and providing consulting services for companies that lack planning for the preservation and categorization of data that could be required in eventual litigation.

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

Robert DeFazio — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:17:44 GMT

We will likely never use cloud computing for a number of reasons, most of which are legal issues. Many of these issues go back to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. That was the law that required companies whose computing equipment that are a part of the e-mail infrastructure to retain copies of all e-mail messages that pass through their servers for at least 90 days. Current pending legislation that has already passed in the House of Representatives and is awaiting passage in the Senate would extend that holding period to two years.Existing case law indicates that rights to privacy seem to vanish when data of any kind is stored in any more or less public repository. For example, in [i]United States v. Councilman[/i] (case #03-1383, 6/29/2004), it was decided that defendant Councilman did nothing illegal when he directed his ISP to produce a program for internal use that would read e-mail messages sent to his customers from Amazon.com before those messages had been delivered to their intended recipients. The basis of that decision was that the messages were in temporary storage in RAM or on hard discs. Google "processes" gmail subscribers' e-mail messages at the specific direction of its advertisers in order to enable them to target their advertising to users more precisely. In short, putting anything in a cloud environment sacrifices rights to privacy and confidentiality. Companes that say they keep tight reins on information obtained from their customers and which at the same time use cloud computing in order to mitigate expenses are either engaging in self-deception or sophistry.Taking things a bit further, let's say that a company were to be sued civily. Current legal practices emphasize the use of e-discovery, a process that requires opposing parties to produce volumes of digital evidence in response to demands from their counterparties. The scope of such demands include all e-mail messages; instant messages; electronic documents; exact copies of entire hard discs from workstations and servers either on premises or off including those owned by 1099 contractors, home computers (if companies allow employees to do work from home), and off shore developers; cached files produced by web browers; recoverable deleted files; cell phones and PDAs; and other forms of electronic communication that have the capacity to be persisted in some form of storage. Let's say that a company were to use Google's services for storage of data. Google maintains data centers around the globe, some of them in Eastern Europe and Russia. Some of the data centers where it holds data are not owned by Google itself; instead it leases space in those facilities. Now let's say that a client company gets sued and a demand for production of data commences. Imagine the cost and complexity of obtaining data from a data center located in Russia that is operated by Russian nationals under Russian law.How expensive can it get? In the 2001 case of [i]Rowe Entertainment, Inc v. William Morris Agency[/i] just shy of $11 million was spent on e-discovery before the litigants even appeared on the first day of the trial. Most patent infringement cases today cost around $4.5 million, most of that being e-discovery costs. It is assumed by many in the legal profession that the average case involving a small- to medium-sized company would entail between $2-3.5 million in e-discovery costs.Let's take a much smaller and more personal example. A friend of mine who runs a one-man software company recently sued a client for reverse engineering and decompiling software that he provided the client under license prohibiting such acts. The actual monetary damages were not yet realized, but had they been, the amount would have been in the range of $150-200 K. The trial itself which lasted four days cost him $80,000. The e-discovery costs preceeding the trial amounted to more than $300,000.The latest fashion in computing management of documents is "de-duplication," a technique of data storage that keeps only the most current versions documents and data in archives intended for either later reference or disaster recovery. Anyone who has ever worked with an attorney will know that attorneys are paper-centric in their thought processes. They don't want to see what you have now but rather what you had 3 years ago that you sent to the person who is now suing you. They want to see the revisions of documents, the process of communication, the promises made in the ebb and flow of the relationship before everything went sour. Those are the pieces of information that they would use to build your defense in court. De-duplication destroys every shred of that grist for the defense. CTOs, DBAs, and application programmers often take the initiative to do things that promise to streamline operations and reduce capital costs. That is an excellent motive, but often in the hindsight afforded to a litigator such actions can be the death knell for a company. Destruction of evidence, even if unintentional, can lead to charges of spoliation which can eviscerate a company's defense. I am not an attorney, but I have come to believe that either a staff attorney or outside counsel should be made a part of the decision making group when it comes to data practices in a company. Most attorneys couldn't put a simple Lego toy together in under 24 hours let alone pretend to know what class inheritance or an iterative loop is. What they do know, however, is what the court system will expect to be produced in litigation, and it behooves any company that believes that it will eventually have to step into a courtroom as a defendant (i.e. everyone) to maintain its data accordingly.What are the implications of this? It means that when data is stored, it needs to be stored in two entirely different ways, each with their own disaster recovery plans. The first way is the tradition IT way - minimal footprints, keeping only the most current data for purposes of recovery, and being able to produce a quick restore to get things running when bad things happen. The second way targets the needs of the business as a legal entity. Data has to be categorized based on its likely use in a legal defense. Things can only be deleted according to specific, legally defensible written policies after so many months have elapsed. Revisions of documents have to be maintained as well as the final documents. When a final document has been produced, a hash of the document has to be produced and published so that later pretenders can be disproven to be authentic. The computational method for producing the hash has to be saved along with all software and operating systems that were used to produce the documents. Cloud computing should only be used for things that contain ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that is confidential, private, or even remotely so since cloud storage forfeits any rights to privacy. That includes e-mail messages (which are usually the most damning pieces of evidence), documents and memos, and databases.Your reaction might be, "If that's the case, is it really cheaper to store anything digitally instead of on paper?" Your reaction might be right. The nice thing about paper is that when a final document is produced, the possibility for alteration becomes severly limited. It can be locked in a vault, and that's the end of the life cycle for that document. Paper consumes natural resources and space, however, and it was the urge to reduce those costs that helped fueled the drive toward electronic storage. Now, however, the digital world has taken on a life of its own, and the space required to store the data contained in electronic documents is being overwhelmed by the space requirements and computing costs for the storage and manipulation of the meta data, or data about the data.On a closing note, serious thought needs to be given to the way that humans behave in a natural environment. Deforestation led to electronic storage out of good intentions, but now the power consumed to maintain what is admittedly the fragile state of data threatens to do even more harm. The sources of power used to keep the growing millions of servers, workstations, phones, televisions, lighting systems, cooling systems, and communication devices operating are generally fueled by coal. The delivery systems for the physical equipment and the people who operate them are generally fueled by fossil fuels. The technology that permits the use of these fuels assumes that robbing the atmosphere of oxygen and then dumping the byproducts produced from combustion back into the atmosphere is an acceptable practice. In the face of what is increasingly appearing to be unstoppable climate change, the computing industry's initiative has been toward so-called "green" computing. The intention is good, but if the growth of the scope and intensity of computing activity and resource consumption continues unabated, green computing will mean nothing. Which is more important, losing trees or losing air? The IT industry, like many other industries, is rapidly approaching a point at which it must become sufficiently self-aware to be able to say that perhaps it needs to throttle its own growth as an act of social conscience.

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

Simon_L — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:17:37 GMT

[quote][b]GRE-452109 (10/22/2009)[/b][hr]How do we think the Cloud will affect the 'employability' of the DBA?Do we think it will reduce the amount of DBA jobs available? (as a results of adavantage 'Free from administrative headaches?')does the cloud mean and end to the DBAs Job?[/quote]reading an article by Brent Ozar he mentions "...I don't think DBAs are the target market for SQL Server in the cloud. If a company has enough database needs to hire a full-time DBA, then they also probably have enough needs to build their own database server infrastructure internally as well."I certainly hadnt considered it that way before I must admit... certainly everywhere you look microsoft seem extremely keen to point out this isnt the end of the dba as we know it etc .. is this because they need dba "buy in" for the concept ... maybe the equivalent of the "no further redundancies planned at this stage" speech Im sure a few of us of have heard before....Patric McElroy was obviously keen to state it would increase the richness of the features a dba can offer.... hmmmmmmmm ~simon

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

Peter Midgley — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:53:53 GMT

[quote][b]Rob Goddard (10/22/2009)[/b][hr]also I'm not sure on what the pricing model will be once the CTP is over [/quote]See the link on reply number 1 for pricing.

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

Rob Goddard — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:34:36 GMT

[quote][b]bwieland (10/22/2009)[/b][hr]Jacob and others,I may be a neophyte, but I am curious as to what you and others believe the Azure environment will provide over an existing IIS and web based applications...I don't see the return on investment in the model....Hence, can you expound on why an organization would buy azure space versus the traditional IIS and browser based applications? Thanks.[/quote]I'm no expert in SQL Azure, I haven't even had my invitation code yet, also I'm not sure on what the pricing model will be once the CTP is over so this is all speculative, but for us there could be a number of possibilities.We're never going to be able to get directors to buy in to putting sensitive or critical data out in the cloud straight away, but there are a few database candidates here where it could work out a lot more cost effective to farm them out to the cloud.One example: We sell insurance, and the majority of our retail business comes via the web. Our main site relies on a tiny SQL database that just contains 'reference data', like drop downs, up to date motor info etc. Nothing sensitive, risk info etc all goes elsewhere via other web services. But if that database wasn't available the site wouldn't work and we'd lose a lot of business. It costs to have the high availability clusters and the DR redundant hardware and data centres that it takes to keep that one database online 24/7 come hell or high water, and I wonder what the cost difference will be in hosting that on Azure?EDIT: typo

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

bwieland — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 06:44:19 GMT

Jacob and others,I may be a neophyte, but I am curious as to what you and others believe the Azure environment will provide over an existing IIS and web based applications...I don't see the return on investment in the model....Hence, can you expound on why an organization would buy azure space versus the traditional IIS and browser based applications? Thanks.

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

blandry — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 06:01:27 GMT

Thanks for a insightful, informative primer on Azure!

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

SQL-DBA — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:45:25 GMT

You beat me to the punch, and nicely I might add. Not finding ANYTHING on this subject, I just submitted an intro article on SQL Azure to SSC. I didn't know about these other clients, so thanks for letting me know!

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

GRE (Gethyn Ellis) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:44:57 GMT

How do we think the Cloud will affect the 'employability' of the DBA?Do we think it will reduce the amount of DBA jobs available? (as a results of adavantage 'Free from administrative headaches?')does the cloud mean and end to the DBAs Job?

RE: Getting started with SQL Azure

Peter Midgley — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 02:34:06 GMT

Many thanks Jacob for taking the trouble to post this; I had been wondering about Azure, and now have much more confidence to step into a trial of it.About pricing: [url=http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/]this link[/url] shows how it works both during CTP and commercially.kind regardsPete

Getting started with SQL Azure

jacob sebastian — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:49:11 GMT

Comments posted to this topic are about the item [B]Getting started with SQL Azure[/B]