Free Microsoft Database in the Cloud (Beta) - TONYSO - Site Home

Sign up today for the free (signup required) Beta of SQL Server Data Services (SSDS). SSDS are highly scalable, on-demand data storage and query processing utility services. Built on robust SQL Server database and Windows Server technologies, these services provide high availability, security and support standards-based web interfaces for easy programming and quick provisioning.

From the FAQ:

SQL Server Data Services is a storage and query processing utility providing mega scale, high availability, reliability, and geo-distributed data services in the Cloud. Customers use the service on-demand, with no up-front cost. It eliminates the initial investment in hardware and software and the on-going cost for storage administration, scale maintenance. Developers and Service providers can quickly run their on-demand applications with minimal infrastructure cost.

What are the target customers and scenarios for SQL Server Data Services?

Target Customers:

Small to medium businesses looking to reduce their capital and operational cost of storing and maintaining high-volume data off-premise.
Developers and Service providers hosting data-intensive and mashup on-demand applications with minimal infrastructure investments in security, availability and manageability.
Enterprise customers building edge applications can collaborate on large or shared data sets.

Target Customer Scenarios:

Archival data (e.g., aged data).
Reference data (e.g., catalogs).
Storing large amounts of structured or semi-structured data with a flexible schema definition or unstructured data with related structured metadata.
Running applications that can tolerate data access latency across the Internet.
Storing data that is naturally partitionable into disjoint data sets requiring little or no cross-correlations.
Running applications that have limited or batched data access.
Read-only or read-mostly data sets.
Typical scenarios include business solutions like HR services, healthcare records management, data archiving and internet facing applications like social networking and picture sharing.