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Microsoft's SQL Azure and Future

It is now just over a year since Microsoft began charging users of its Windows Azure platform, including the SQL Azure database service. With 31,000 customers for Windows Azure, SQL Azure and the Windows Azure AppFabric middleware platform, the company now has a solid perspective on the use cases for SQL Azure, compared to hosted or on-premises SQL Server. In many ways, SQL Azure is a product of customer demand – Microsoft had originally created SQL Server Data Services (later known as SQL Data Services) as a simple data-query service, equivalent to Amazon's SimpleDB, but changed course to create SQL Azure, a full-blown relational database as a service, when it became clear that customers wanted to retain existing skills and extend existing applications to the Azure platform, rather than developing new applications using only Web-services protocols.

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