A new acronym is coming our way for SQL Server: SSDS. It stands for SQL Server Database Srevices, announced last week at the MIX conference and is an interesting idea.
At least it's interesting if you treat it like what it is: a service for non-critical data. I know that Microsoft says this service will have a business class SLA, but I'm not convinced. Microsoft is a big company and if my book list gets lost, I'm not sure they're jumping through hoops to get it back.
But Google has gathered a tremendous amount of data in a similar way with Blogger, Google Groups, etc. And how many of you blog? How many of you back up that blog data?
The idea that you can intelligently use cloud services, especially database services, to boost the performance of your applications is worth considering. What about putting up lookup data or catalog data for your products out there for customers? It could be a way to lower the load on your current database. What about deploying some data up there for mobile applications, that non-critical ata that might not need high security?
There is probably a huge class of data that you might consider replicating (meaning keeping a copy on your real database) out to SSDS, and then retrieving it from the cloud as a first choice. You probably need to have some backup method of then querying the main database if the cloud is gone, but this is an interesting idea to me for some of your data.
And since it's built on SQL Server, it should be fairly easy for your developers to work with.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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