SDS Strategy : Mid Term Correction?

Today Microsoft announced a change of plans on their SDS platform (http://blogs.msdn.com/ssds/archive/2009/03/10/9469228.aspx). Essentially in short they are getting rid of ACE model and adopting a relational model. It is indeed a very shocking development especially for people (like us) who have invested some time & energy in adopting this technology. As Roger Jennings posted in MSDN forums (http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ssdsgetstarted/thread/c1418815-a391-46f3-95cd-4c21856acde0), "That's a lotta work by the SSDS, SDS, and Astoria teams to throw down the drain."

I personally believe that this change is for good and I am looking forward to see what new they have in store for us. At Cerebrata, our interest in this is purely from tooling point of view and I would be interested in learning more about the mechanisms by which metadata of the database hosted in the cloud is exposed to the developers.

One thing I do think led to this, is the way this technology has been pitched to the developer community. If you name your platform as SQL Server Data Services (later change it to SQL Data Services), general perception would be to have same set of capabilities as you would expect from your SQL Server. Unfortunately with ACE model, it was just not possible. IMHO, if Microsoft has not pitched it as SQL Server on the cloud (I don't really care if you are storing my authorities, containers and entities in a SQL Server or not), things would have been fine and it would have been accepted as an alternate storage mechanism.

Like I said, next few months would be interesting to see how this new SDS evolves. I am hoping when they come out with new beta now they will have answers to issues other than technology (like compliance etc.) which will be extremely critical for adoption at enterprise level.

Cheers!!!

Gaurav

Announcing the launch of Omega.SDSClient

Yesterday we launched our second product, Omega.SDSClient – a browser based client for Microsoft SQL Data Service (part of Azure platform). I will not go into the details of SDS & Azure platform as there is plenty of information available and I am certainly not the most qualified to comment on these. I would rather talk about the product itself. It certainly had been an interesting experience while development of this product. I would like to share those here:

• Omega.SDSClient is developed using Microsoft Silverlight & Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) technology. This was our first attempt at both of these technologies and I believe we have done a decent job at that. Essentially the team started with no knowledge on these two platforms and learned stuff as we were building this application.
  
• Omega.SDSClient is developed completely by my team here in India and I think they have done a remarkable job considering their overall and lack of prior experience with the technology used to build this product.
  

Coming back to Omega.SDSClient, here is our basic premise about building this as a web based product: If your data is stored in cloud, why do you need to download/install any software to manage it? So it is a web based application built on Silverlight 2 and WCF and it lets you do the following with your SDS data repositories:

• Manage Authorities
  
• Manage Containers
  
• Manage Entities
  

This is obviously the first version of the application and we hope to add more features to it. Currently we are planning to provide BLOB & Querying support in this product. Hopefully we should be out with our next version soon.

Please do check it out. The URL is http://omega.cerebrata.com/default.aspx?r=BLSP.

Drop me a line with your feedback.

I will keep you posted on the progress of the same.

Cheers!!!