Hans Olav

• Episode 72 - New Tools for Windows Identity Foundation and ACS

  Mar 20, 2012 at 7:48 AM

  @philjay: Thanks a lot! I'll quit my whining now

• Episode 72 - New Tools for Windows Identity Foundation and ACS

  Mar 20, 2012 at 7:48 AM

  @WadeWegner: Hi, thanks a lot for the post - it describes the situation in details, just as I wanted to know. But simply saying that the article was so brilliant there's nothing more to say isn't an actual argument for not covering the news. It's rather a good argument for presenting the article, no?

• Episode 72 - New Tools for Windows Identity Foundation and ACS

  Mar 20, 2012 at 7:45 AM

  @codingoutloud: Hi, I'm merely stating that not even mentioning it in CouldCover is a bit cowardly. Isn't the show called "cloud cover" and not "cloud coverup"? (Cheap point, I know).

• Episode 72 - New Tools for Windows Identity Foundation and ACS

  Mar 18, 2012 at 4:00 AM

  Wade,

  What up with not covering the azure outage???
  I've been waiting for you guys to go through that. Not even mentioning it seems cowardly and like you're trying to keep it quiet. C'mon! You're better than this!

  Also: What happened to fullscreen video? Can't find out how to do it now that the silverlight player is gone.

  Thanks!

• Episode 69 - SQL Azure Federations with George Huey

  Feb 23, 2012 at 11:40 AM

  @Cihan Biyikoglu:

  Thanks for your answer and your excellent blog post! I'm currently working with a relatively small dataset (only 80 GB database on-premise) and sharding up to hundreds of nodes is a whole other story. In this space SQL Azure Federations is truly a lifesaver!

  But SQL Azure Federations could become the cloud database-solution numero uno or the de facto standard! If it just works out-of-the-box for small federations upto like 10 shards. I would guess that 90% of real-world databases would fit in this category, or maybe even with fewer shards?

  Anyways; Thanks a lot for the input, Cihan!

• Episode 69 - SQL Azure Federations with George Huey

  Feb 23, 2012 at 5:08 AM

  @Cihan Biyikoglu: See my comment in the post below..  Forgot to reply to your post.

  Also, if it's possible at all, I would love to get some hints as to where sql azure federations is going form now. This could be a database-killer app as I see it!

• Episode 69 - SQL Azure Federations with George Huey

  Feb 23, 2012 at 5:04 AM

  Hi Cihan! Thanks for answering my post

  1. What I want from SQL Azure Federations
     1. I want true elasticity - scale out and scale in - without downtime. As of now, it's only possible to scale-out without downtime. If you want to reduce the number of shards you need to take the production system offline.
     2. I want to be able to write simple sql commands like
        DELETE Customers WHERE CustomerID IN (X, Y, Z)
        without having to worry if X, Y, Z is in the same shard or not. Why not just distribute out the sql command to all shards and join them together before my SqlCommand gets the results back? I see that this might hurt performance, but not necessarily! It's faster to let 3 servers process this command in parallell than to have it execute in only one server if your dataset is huge. In the very least let there be an option to do it, and let developers have the option to choose simplicity vs. performance.
  2. "Connection string vs. USE FEDERATION statements"
     1. What I meant here is simply that the difference between having 3 SQL Azure databases and 3 different connections strings in your production-code to reach them is essentially the same as having a SQL Azure Federation with 3 shards and starting every SQL command with "USE FEDERATION ..." statements to reach the correct database shard. From a practical standpoint SQL Azure Federations doesn't add that much practical added value to the cost, implementation or maintenance of production systems, as I see it.

• Episode 69 - SQL Azure Federations with George Huey

  Feb 09, 2012 at 4:05 AM

  SQL Azure Federations could be great. What's the deal with having to specify which shard to access using the USE FEDERATION statement?

  As I see it, it doesn't make much of a difference in having to incorporate these statements in every sql-statement and actually having n number of different connection-strings in your code. The only real functionality given here is that it's easy to scale out your database to many shards, and that's it. Going from SQL Aure to SQL Azure Federations still requires you to significantly change your code.

  Honestly, I think that the SQL Azure Federation story today is weak. There needs to be a higher abstraction level so that you don't need to handle the different shards in your code. Isn't this obvious?

• Episode 68 - Throttling in SQL Azure with Scott Klein

  Jan 28, 2012 at 3:51 AM

  A new episode AT LAST!!! I've been waiting and waiting... Thanks!

   

• TWC9: Nineys, MIX Open Call, WP7 GPS Emulator, & lots of new software releases

  Feb 09, 2011 at 12:31 AM

  Oh, and did I mention we also have universal... wait for it... HEALTH CARE*?
  
  *) If by universal you mean excluding dental care which is for what ever reason not covered and insanely expensive after you turn 18. But c'mon, you don't really need those to eat, right?

  So in your faces, all you countries that don't have that! yeah...

  Go Norway

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