Microsoft has been pretty clear about their commitment to the entire Azure infrastructure. The updates to Azure come out on a massively accelerated schedule. Because of this, they’re doing lots of code on lots of things that may, one day, end up in your full blown SQL Server instance, but are currently only available in Windows Azure SQL Database. This is because of that accelerated schedule. It frees Microsoft developers up to experiment a little. I saw some evidence of it the other day.

I had been working on a series of queries for the pre-conference seminar that I helped put on at TechEd (and one that I’m doing for the PASS Summit). When I write queries, I use SQL Prompt. Sorry to be plugging Red Gate products on the blog, but I happened to love Red Gate products even before I started working for the company. Prompt is one of the best. Prompt works with Azure, although you can sometimes hit errors. Anyway, I was typing up a query when I noticed a system view being offered to me that I’d never seen before, sys.database_query_store_options. I ran a SELECT against it and got this result set:

I immediately checked my SQL Server instances and did a search against the internet to see if this was just something I had simply missed. It wasn’t on SQL Server and I didn’t find a single reference to this system view in Boogle (or Ging).

What’s it mean? What do I do with it? I don’t have a clue. Heck, it could just be some obscure bit of output from Federation or something. I really don’t know. I was just excited to find evidence of ongoing development within WASD. And you see it first in Azure.