SQL Azure Federations is open for business!

Wooohooowwwy!

Finally the day arrives! The year end update to SQL Azure is live and you can now use federations across all geographies of SQL Azure. There also a great new surprise we have been working on; we are making Federations available through open specification promise. OSP (open specification promise) is a promise not to assert patents against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation that conforms to a Covered Specification. You can find the full definition here. This simply means that anyone in the open source community or in commercial development business can freely utilize the federations model in your libraries and utilize the same runtime model for representing distribution of data in your partitioning implementations. OSP for federations bring great interoperability and openness to the federations model. You can find more details on Ram’s blog here about details of the SQL Database Federations OSP.

Well, if you would like to get started, there are many how-tos and walk-throughs. here are a few links that will help;

There are also a few chats and demos I have recorded over the last few weeks to help get you started on federations;

We are obviously not done yet with federations. There will be more content, updates to the technology and other exciting news. Simply look for #sqlfederations in twitter or come to my blog regularly for updates.

Cihan Biyikoglu - Program Manager SQL Azure