Free Microsoft Database in the Cloud (Beta)
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.
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.
