Federations Product Evaluation Program Now Open for Nominations!

Recent Update: the program is at full capacity and nomination survey is now closed. Thank you for the great number of nominations. For questions about the program details, you can contact us at <SAPESupport@Microsoft.Com.>

Microsoft SQL Azure Federations Product Evaluation Program nomination survey is now open. To nominate an application and get access to the preview of this technology, please fill out this survey.

Let me take a second to explain the program details: the preview program is a great fit for folks who would like to get experience with the federations programmability model. As part of the preview, you get access to very early bits on scale-minimized versions of SQL Azure. This minimized version does not provide high availability or high performance and scale just yet as it runs under a different configuration. Those properties will come when we deploy to the public cluster. However you can exercise the programmability model and develop a full fledged application. There may still be minor changes to the surface but will be incremental small changes at this point. Participants will also get a chance to provide the development team with detailed feedback on the federations technology before it appears in SQL Azure. The preview program is available to only a limited set of customers. Customer who are selected for the program, will receive communication once the program is kicked off in the months of May and June 2011.

Looking forward to all the nominations! Thanks

Cihan Biyikoglu – SQL Azure – Program Manager