Microsoft’s David Robinson has announced on the SQL Azure Team Blog that they have released Service Update 1 for SQL Azure. This update has four main changes:

First, they have enabled  six Dynamic Management Views (DMVs), which will allow you to have a little more insight into what is going on with your SQL Azure databases. Here is the list of what is enabled now.

· sys.dm_exec_connections – This view returns information about the connections established to your database.

· sys.dm_exec_requests – This view returns information about each request that executes within your database

· sys.dm_exec_sessions – This view shows information about all active user connections and internal tasks.

· sys.dm_tran_database_transactions – This view returns information about transactions at the database level.

· sys.dm_tran_active_transactions – This view returns information about transactions for your current logical database.

· sys.dm_db_partition_stats – This view returns page and row-count information for every partition in the current database.

Second, you can switch back and forth between the Web and Business Edition database editions (at 1GB and 10GB sizes, respectively), with a simple ALTER DATABASE T-SQL command.

Third, they have increased the idle connection timeout from five minutes to 30 minutes. This will make normal, interactive development in tools like the 2008 R2 version of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) much less painful.

Finally, they have relaxed the requirements regarding long running transactions in order to make it easier to do things like bulk loads into SQL Azure.

These are all welcome changes that make SQL Azure easier to work with very soon after the initial release.