In the recent months, there had been some worry amongst developers concerning the Azure platform in light of the early comments Microsoft folks had made such as “If it works with SQL Server, it will largely work with SQL Data Services.” In fact, it based wasn't worry for some, it was outright panic. I am involved with QA and the prospect of supporting yet another not fully SQL compliant "data connector" was unappetizing.
Recent announcement have allayed my worries for the moment, and I am confident Microsoft will not leave billions of dollars in SQL infrastructure in the mix! But it does raise some good questions about the trade-offs between sticking with ACID compliance vs BASE availability and scalability. Obviously, these have been questions which the Azure folks have been thinking deeply about. But even more fundamentally, it raises questions about SQL itself. I have seen first hand what some of the proprietary database platforms, such as Vertica can do. These database have special significance in the realm of business intelligence, and specifically in reporting, which is my industry. Simply put, transactional requirements in analytics database are next to nill and all we are concerned about is combing very large amounts of data in novel ways- and doing it *quickly*.
So is SQL on its way out the door in the analytics space? I think not-- Sanjay's article over at Data Stream brings it home.
"SQL has served us well and needs to shed some remnants of a different era, but will allow us to leverage the trillions that have been poured into SQL-based technologies." - Data Stream, is SQL the x86 of business?
It's a good article. I believe MS made a great decision. Sure, we are going to have to wait a little longer for Azure to fully implement its SQL compatibility, but as long as I can feed it SQL-92, I'll be waiting in line for its release!