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.