Microsoft details changes coming to SQL Data Services

After acknowledging a couple of weeks ago that it was changing direction with SQL Data Services (SDS), Microsoft officials are filling in the gaps about exactly what will be changing when.

Microsoft execs detailed the forthcoming changes to Microsoft's hosted database service -- one of the mid-tier layers of its Azure cloud-services platform -- in a couple of new blog posts on March 10.

From the SQL Data Services Team blog posting:

"If we flash back about a year ago to Mix 08, Nigel Ellis got up on stage to introduce the community to SDS which, at the time, was a flexible entity based cloud database that you accessed using standard internet protocols. We made this announcement with the promise that more relational capabilities would be coming - and they did. But the universal feedback we received from our TAP partners and other early adopters was the need for a relational database delivered as a service."

The end result? From that same posting from SDS Senior Program Manager David Robinson:

"(G)iven the feature set we are planning to support in SDS v1, a majority of database applications will “just work”, allowing developers to target on and off-premises deployments with essentially the same code base."

The revamped SQL Data Services seemingly won't be delayed by the move. According to the SQL Server News Blog, the revamped SDS (with the added Tabular Data Stream suupport) will be out in public Community Technology Preview (CTP) test-build form by mid 2009 and available commercially in the second half of this year.