If you are some of the few people who have tested / used Azure SQL Federation, you’ll be surprised, happy … or sad to know that Azure SQL Federation has been discontinued.
Azure SQL Federation always has been a source of architectural debates since its creations about 3 years ago. Now this is official.
“
We understand your concerns around the deprecation of the Federations in SQLDB. The change is necessary because of scaling limits in the current implementation of Federations and incompatibility with the newest features we are introducing in the cloud data platform. We will be investing over time in deeper guidance and capabilities to fill the gap – in the interim we recommend utilizing a “self-sharding” approach that many of our large scale customers (including those that host hundreds or thousands of DBs in Azure use) implement on our platform. Examples of sharding patterns for databases in Azure are covered in the Cloud Service Fundamentals samples and articles from the Azure CAT team -- http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/17987.cloud-service-fundamentals.aspx .
In any case, we would be interested in learning more about how you are using Federations today and what your highest priority requirements are for future capabilities, so I would welcome the opportunity for a phone discussion or separate email thread. Please reach out to me by email to stuarto at Microsoft dot com.
Stuart Ozer
Group Program Manager
Azure SQL Database
Stuart Ozer - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 1:01:39 AM
”
Here is the official documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/dn741330.aspx
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Also, in case you missed it, Azure SQL Reporting also has been retired the 9th May, 2014: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/dn528853.aspx where IaaS VM with full SQL Server and SSRS is its replacement.
In order to create such VM, I spent quite a lot of time configuring it particularly the security access despite detailed documentation. You will find a way of doing so a bit quicker based on a LARGE Powershell : http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/dn449661.aspx
