Microsoft's New Database Cloud Ready to Rumble with Amazon
The gloves are off. The tag line for Microsoft's new SQL Server Data Service is Your Data, Any Place, Any Time. Thems fighten' words. Microsoft is itch'n for a fight! Who will be Amazon's second?
The service description:
SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) are highly scalable, on-demand data storage and query processing utility services. Built on robust SQL Server database and Windows Server technologies, these services provide high availability, security and support standards-based web interfaces for easy programming and quick provisioning.
Sounds like a fast uppercut aimed squarely at SimpleDB's jaw. As a developer what do you need to know?
- Authorities give billing entities a way to organize their usage for accounting, security and co-location purposes. All containers under a single authority are provisioned within the same data center. As such authorities are the unit of geo-scale and geo-location. For example: Seattle or San Francisco.
- Containers create contexts and scope for entity storage and query. For example, within its authorities, operations could choose to assign each member their own container, intended to contain a set of personal data for that member. Containers are the unit of consistency in the Microsoft SSDS service. For example: Autos for Sale, Services Offered.
- Entities are the fundamental unit of storage in the system. Entities are a bag of scalars with no enforced type. For example, an individual member‟s jobs, educational institutions, contacts, recommendations, etc. could all be modeled as entities.
- Creation and deletion of containers. There are no updatable container properties.
- Creation, replacement, and deletion of entities.
- Retrieval of a single container in a serialized format.
- Retrieval of a single entity in a serialized format.
To query addressed to a container to retrieve all entities in that container having a “City” property equal to “Seattle” and a “State” property equal to “WA” would be written as follows:
from e in entities
where e[“City”] == “Seattle” && e[“State”] == “WA”
select e
Where Microsoft is behind Amazon is that they don't have EC2 and S3. Microsoft is having you traverse the internet for each database access. Now let''s say you have chunks of large storage stored off in a storage cloud. That's a lot of overhead.
A major benefit of AWS is the free bandwidth and higher performance within the AWS cloud.
If your application is completely hosted within the cloud the only slow part is from the server to the user's browser.
All-in-all SSDS seems very comparable to and competitive with SimpleDB. Hard to say without solid pricing information. But it will be interesting to see how Microsoft's cloud strategy evolves and how we can all benefit from the competition.
