Introducing Data Sync Service for SQL Azure

I am extremely happy to announce the public preview of our new Data Sync Service for SQL Azure. For those of you who have been following this blog, you might recall our Project “Huron”. In this project we talked about our vision of creating a Data Hub in the cloud to provide users with the ability to seamlessly share and collaborate on data regardless of the location and regardless of network connectivity. Back in November ’09 we introduced SQL Azure Data Sync as the first part of this vision which was to take SQL Server data and extend that to the cloud and then take that data and share it with other SQL Server databases.

Now with the Data Sync Service we are extending on the "Huron" vision. With no code, you can configure your SQL Azure database to be synchronized with one or more SQL Azure databases in any of our Windows Azure data centers. By doing so, it provides you the ability to extend that data to the location closest to your end users. All the while our scheduled synchronization service moves changes back and forth between these databases ensuring that changes get propagated to each of the databases in the data center. In conjunction with SQL Azure Data Sync, this data can also be synchronized back on-premises.

I have a TechEd session this week where I will be demonstrating all of this as well as how we will be extending the capabilities of the sync framework for creating offline applications, specifically allowing Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and even non-MSFT platforms to be used for the clients. 

If you are interested in giving the Data Sync Service a try please go to https://sqlazurelabs.com and click on “SQL Azure Data Sync Service” and send us your registration code. Starting early next week we will start adding registered users to the service.

I am really looking forward to your feedback.

Liam Cavanagh