OK, as a follow-up to my last post I've now taken the time to read the SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) whitepaper and have managed to discern some interesting information. I figured I'd stick it up here for reference.
Administration
- Customers will be billed by account and each account will be accessed using a Windows Live ID
- The administration tool will be web-based
Data Manipulation
- The lowest level unit of accessibility is an entity. Examples of entities are [Person], [Address], [Book].
- SSDS supports (and only supports) CRUD capabilities on entities. I'm deducing from this that we won't be able to store our own procedural code in one of these services.
- An entity has properties. The possible data types for properties are string, binary, boolean, number and datetime
- CRUD operations are possible on entities
- The query language will be LINQ
- The data can also be accessed via RESTful URIs
- There will also be SOAP endpoints although it beats me why you'd want to use them if you there are RESTful endpoints
- Entities (actually containers of entities) can be read-only or read-write
Its quite obvious to me that this is going to be built atop the ADO.Net Entity Framework and the data will be exposed via RESTful URIs using ADO.Net Data Services. The ADO.Net Data Services team have already provided a suite of client libraries that will be used to access SSDS services from Silverlight, AJAX apps, etc...
Three weeks ago Robert Scoble said:
It’s almost too late for the others to get into the game [of data storage on the web]. It’s amazing (or maybe it should be “amazoning”) to me that Ray Ozzie over at Microsoft has let Amazon have so much runway.
So, I ask you, can anyone stop Amazon from totally taking over the corporate data infrastructure market?
Well Robert, SSDS is Microsoft's riposte. Can they stop Amazon? Who knows, it might slow them down a bit (when SSDS finally gets released - it hasn't even reached beta yet) but Amazon are already miles and miles ahead with this. Having said that, its difficult to know how far Amazon have got into the enterprise data storage market and that will be Microsoft's key battleground.
-Jamie