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SQL Data Services Update
SQL Data Service Update at PDC 2008
From PDC 2008:
SQL Data Services (SDS) Update
This morning, we announced, the latest upgrade of SSDS at the PDC2008 conference in Los Angeles. We have also changed the name of the service from SSDS to SDS (SQL Data Services). In order to support this announcement, the documentation on our DevCenter has been updated to cover the new features in this upgrade.
Key members of our team are at the PDC. We hope to be able to meet with many of you who are attending this event. Please come to our talks, stop by our booth, and say "Hello" to us in the services lounge.
The SDS upgrade announced at the PDC will be made available to you in early November and broadly available as a public CTP (Community Technology Preview) in mid-November.
New features announced today:
Additional Query Support
a) Joins
Join query support in SQL Data Services (SDS) allow you to retrieve entities from a container based on a join condition involving properties on different kinds of entities. For example, if you have a container with customer and order entities, a query to find orders for a given a customer would require you join the customer and order entities based on a common property. Since both the customers and orders are in the same container, you query the same container twice (using aliases); first find the customer and then find orders for that customer using a join condition.
b) OfKind
To simplify the join Syntax, SQL Data Services (SDS) has introduced an OfKind function. This function can specified on the queries From clause to distinguish between multiple Kinds within a container.
An example would be
from c in entities.OfKind("Customer") select c
c) Order By
SQL Data Services (SDS) now supports an Order By clause in our query syntax. This optional clause allows you to have your query results returned order by the property of your choosing in either ascending or descending order
d) Take
SQL Data Services (SDS) now supports a Take function in its query language. This new function can be used to restrict the number of entities returned in a given query.
.Net Access Control Integration (SOAP Only)
The .NET Access Control Service is a hosted, secure, standards-based infrastructure for multi-party, federated authentication and rules-driven, claims-based authorization. SQL Data Services (SDS) supports authentication and authorization via tokens issued by the .NET Access Control Service. This allows applications secure not only their own web service layer, but also their SDS-based data layer using the same, declarative access control mechanism.
Other forms of credentials, besides username/password, can be used to obtain a token from the identify provider. They are:
a) X.509 certificate
b) InfoCard
In this release, using token-based authentication scheme with SDS has the following limitations:
a) When communicating with SDS, the token-based security is available only when using the SOAP protocol. For applications using the REST protocol, only the basic authentication is supported (username/password).
b) Requires a .NET Services solution account.
Metrics
Service users often want to know the usage pattern of the service. Microsoft® SQL Data Services (SDS) user may want to find:
a) How many containers or entities do I have?
b) What is the total storage consumed by an authority or a container?
c) What is the amount storage used by blobs in a container?
d) What is the aggregate number of requests (GET, POST, PUT and so on) sent against an authority or a container?
e) What is the number of request and response bytes sent with a specific authority or container in scope?
The service provides this information as properties on authorities and containers.
User Limits during the public CTP (this will change, when we go "Live")
a) Each user will be allowed 50gb of storage across all Authorities
b) 1000 Containers per Authority
c) 1gb of Blob Entities per Container (up from 500mb)
d) 100mb of Flexible Entities per Container (up from 20mb)
e) Each Blob Entity will be capped at 100mb
For more detail, please visit SDS DevCenter at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/dataservices/default.aspx
Thank You,
The SSDS Team
Windows Live OpenID Support
Windows Live ID Committed to OpenID
From PDC 2008:
Beginning today, Windows Live ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider. You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID Web site!
You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID Web site!
The Windows Live ID OpenID Provider (OP) enables anyone with a Windows Live ID account to set up an OpenID alias and to use that alias for identification at an increasing number of OpenID 2.0 relying party sites.
SQL Server 2008 Hyper-V Whitepaper
Running SQL Server 2008 in a Hyper-V Environment
Microsoft has released a Technical Article on running SQL Server 2008 in a Hyper-V environment.
As expected, there is a performance impact and "proper hardware sizing is critical to SQL Server performance".
For me, the jury is still out whether it is worth virtualizing SQL Server (using either VMware or Hyper-V), especially Tier-1 SQL Server instances, due to the number of vCPUs that can be allocated to a VM.
So it’s good to see that Microsoft have finally released such an anticipated whitepaper.
Download: Running SQL Server 2008 in a Hyper-V Environment – Best Practices and Performance Recommendation
SQL Server 2008 CU 1
Microsoft Released SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 2 Cumulative Update 1
Finally…
SQL Server 2008 Cumulative Update 9 (CU1) is available from Microsoft Help and Support (KB956717).
There are a couple of important fixes included, in particular:
- FIX: When you query through a view that uses the ORDER BY clause in SQL Server 2008, the result is still returned in random order. (KB926292)
- FIX: A MERGE statement may not enforce a foreign key constraint when the statement updates a unique key column that is not part of a clustering key and there is a single row as the update source in SQL Server 2008. (KB956718)
- FIX: In SQL Server 2008, a query returns incorrect results for the DATE data type when you run the query on a partitioned table that uses data compression on only one of the partitions (KB957810)
Since SQL Server 2008 was released to manufacture, Microsoft has released 1 Cumulative Update, fixing around 80 bugs:
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| Cumulative Update | Date | Bugs Fixed |
| RTM CU1 | 26-Sep-2008 | 78 |
The Cumulative Updates reflect Microsoft’s new Incremental Servicing Model for SQL Server, which aims to release the latest updates for SQL Server using a regular schedule (every 8 weeks).
Otherwise, I maintain an Excel 2007 spreadsheet that contains a list of all bug fixes for analysis:
Victor Isakov 