John Deutscher » Cloud

SQL Data Services (SDS) cloud API changes

John Deutscher — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:54:52 +0000

The SQL Data Services team has finally publicly announced the new changes that are coming to the cloud API.

This has been rumbling around internally for awhile and a lot of rumors have been flying out there.

After talking to many customers and listening to developers, the SQL team went back to the drawing board and scrapped the SOAP and REST based Authority-Container-Entity(ACE) programming model in favor of a more traditional T-SQL and relational style programming model.

The goal is to make it a lot easier for developers to use their existing skills and knowledge, and make it as simple as switching a connection string to point an application to the cloud.

How they do this is through the Tabular Data Stream (TDS) which is a protocol that exists today in SQL. That means access to Table, Stored Procedures, Triggers, Views, Indexes, Ado.Net, and ODBC.

What about those developers who really like the property bag (triple store…) type of experience? Well, you are left with Windows Azure Tables.

What is really nice to hear is that they will not drop support for REST/HTTP. They will continue to support that model through ADO.NET Data Services.

Security will be provided by SSL encryption and SQL Authentication.

Keep on top of the latest SDS changes through MIX 09 via the MSDN Dev Center.

Running ASP.NET MVC in Windows Azure

John Deutscher — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 04:16:28 +0000

Found this nice post on Jim Nakashima’s site. It is an updated walkthrough of using the ASP.NET MVC RC2 in Windows Azure. I’ve been wanting to set up MVC on my own home server to play with, but I think I would rather get experience with Azure at the same time. Kill two birds with one stone…

Apparently MVC is not officially supported on Azure right now, but there is a sample app and a nice step through for the changes required to get it working.

Be sure to install the hotfix first.

Cloud based Public Data sets from Amazon

John Deutscher — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:10:09 +0000

Amazon announced recently that their EC2 customers can now access a number of public datasets including the DBPedia which contains 274 million RDF triples. This is very cool news. Provides a great cloud based resource for semantic reasoning over this public data, and the ability to incorporate it into your own custom applications.

Here’s just a few of the public data sets that are now available on Amazon web services.

DBpedia Knowledge Base provided by DBpedia.
DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. The DBpedia knowledge base currently describes more than 2.6 million things, including at least 213,000 persons, 328,000 places, 57,000 music albums, 36,000 films, 20,000 companies. The knowledge base consists of 274 million pieces of information (RDF triples).

Freebase Data Dump provided by Freebase.com.
A data dump of all the current facts and assertions in the Freebase system. Freebase is an open database of the world’s information, covering millions of topics in hundreds of categories.

Wikipedia Extraction (WEX) provided by Freebase.com.
The Freebase Wikipedia Extraction (WEX) is a processed dump of the English language Wikipedia.

Check out the Amazon site for more details on the public databases: http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/

Also it is interesting to note that the DBPedia folks recently announced links into the Freebase database that are referenced in their own RDF triples. These links show up as RDF triples that use the OWL SameAs property like this:

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Woody_Allen owl:sameAs http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/guid.9202a8c04000641f800000000004064f

These new links are provided in the 3.2 version of the DBPedia, which you can play around with directly using their SPARQL query endpoint located at http://dbpedia.org/sparql. They also have a richer query interface with sampel SPARQL queries here.