There's been a lot of buzz about the cloud over the past years, with a lot of that attention going to IaaS and SaaS platforms, but there's a revolution (or re-revolution) that is of even more importance, and that's PaaS. What PaaS brings us is the ability to scale horizontally and treat CPU, memory, and storage as pools of resources that are as deep as our checkbooks allow.

In yesterday's post A couple of things to be aware of when working with tables in SQL Azure I showed you some things to be aware of in regards to tables. Today let's talk about how to rebuild an index Let's say you have a table with a clustered index…

The cloud just go a whole lot cheaper for SQL Azure customers To meet evolving customer needs across both ends of the database size spectrum, Microsoft announced that they are lowering the price of SQL Azure and introducing a 100MB database option…

If you are considering moving your SQL Server databases to SQL Azure, you can use the SQL Azure Compatibility Assessment to check if your database schema is compatible with SQL Azure. This service is very easy to use and does not require an Azure accoun…

Microsoft has released Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.1 today. Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio 2008 and the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 RC to enable the creation, configuration, building, debuggi…

According to a post on the SQL Azure Team Blog you can upgrade your CTP accounts to a paid commercial subscription starting today, below is an excerpt from that post

Starting today you will be able to upgrade your Community Technology Preview (CTP) account to a paid commercial subscriptions. If you upgrade your CTP accounts during the month of January, 2010, all Windows Azure platform usage incurred during this month will be at no charge. You will also have full visibility during this month to your W...

This is the second time that I went to the Enterprise Developer Conference. Due to the downturn Microsoft merged the financial and health/live sciences conferences into one. Last years main focus was High Computing, this years main focus was......tada..…

There are some cool things announced by Microsoft

SQL Server Application and Multi-server Private CTP - Registration



As part of SQL Server “Kilimanjaro", we have announced baseline investments for application and multi-server management. We are recruiting customers to participate in a private CTP with SQL Server Engineering. Registration for the Private CTP will take place until December 15, 2008 and the 4-5 week Private CTP will begin in mid-January. Microsoft is looking for participants in entities with at least 1 DBA, more than 25 PCs, and...

Dare Obesanjo has made an excellent post: Windows Azure from a Developer’s Perspective

To try out Azure you need to be running Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista with a bunch of prerequisites you can get from running the Microsoft Web Platform installer. Once you have the various prerequisites installed (SQL Server, IIS 7, .NET Framework 3.5, etc) you should then grab the Windows Azure SDK. Users of Visual Studio will also benefit from grabbing the Windows Azur...

The Azure Services Platform is in CTP, here are some details:

What is the Azure Services Platform?

The Azure Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture gives developers the choice to build web appl...