Microsoft is investing heavily in cloud computing with several online services available

under the Azure Platform. 

SQL Azure

The SQL Azure cloud database offering has been available for about a year now. 

I personally haven’t seen wide adoption for SQL Azure but there’s a lot of interest. 

Most of our clients either don’t think they need to push their data outside their

walls or don’t have the kind of scalability needs that Azure addresses.  There

are some very compelling reasons to use SQL Azure.  Security is one of the big

questions that comes up in client discussions.  The fact is that hosting business

data in Azure is probably more secure than most on-premise solutions.  Short

of some Hollywood action thriller-style terrorist team coming in to take over one

of the Microsoft data centers and holding the staff at gun point while stealing all

the hard drives, data theft isn’t very easy and therefore, not very likely. 

For small scale solutions, SQL Azure is cheap and easy.  For larger-scale needs,

Azure offers the unique ability to scale on demand, making it an ideal way to service

intermittent, extremely high-demand scenarios without building and paying for a clustered

data center.  Since you only pay for what you use and when you use it, licensing

and infrastructure ROI is factored out of the equation until you have a lot of activity. 

Imagine, for example, an on-line retail market site that routine gets only moderate

use.  The owner doesn’t need to invest in any on-premise server hardware or software

licensing if they use SQL Azure for data services.  Because the transaction database

doesn’t typically use a lot of storage, the usual cost is low – let’s say it’s only

$100 per month during slow times.  Now the owner promotes a sale on black Friday,

at the beginning of the Christmas holiday shopping season, and the number of transactions

soars by a factor of thousands.  A single database server or even a small cluster

may not be able to handle this traffic volume but SQL Azure scales on-demand to handle

the load.  Multiple servers are automatically requisitioned during the shopping

day and millions of transactions are performed.  Of course the cost for increased

usage goes up but then drops the next day when traffic settles back down.  The

sale is a success and the owner has made no hardware or licensing investment to handle

the spike in sales.  the same scenario applies to web applications hosted using

the Windows Azure service.  Whether on-premise or in the cloud, most any application

can use SQL Azure for storage and data services with a reliable Internet connection.

SQL Azure Reporting

With reporting and BI coming to the cloud, this will become more a more attractive

offering.  Azure Reporting, essentially, SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services

hosted through the Windows Azure services, should be available as soon as December,

2010.  Subscriptions and more advanced management capabilities won’t be part

of this offering and you can’t deploy to Azure from Report Builder but all of the

reporting features will be available for relational data stored only in SQL Azure

databases.  How does it work?  With a Windows Azure account, simply deploy

a report from BIDS to Windows Azure URL and …whamo bamo, it’s there for anyone who

has been granted access to view it from anywhere in the galaxy.

Azure Data Market

Previously called Project Dallas, the Azure Data Market enables people to share data

streams and other data commodities for free or purchase.  This should be a convenient

way to obtain common or specialized sets of data for integration into applications

– especially data sets that are common to a lot of applications like geographic information,

consumer surveys, real estate and population growth.  https://datamarket.azure.com/

Weblog by Paul Turley and SQL Server BI Blog.