SQL Azure Federations

We’ve spent a lot of time so far discussing certain features in SQL Azure that are not supported in SQL Server. But as it turns out, one converse case exists as well: SQL Azure offers a very interesting feature called Federations, which is not offered by SQL Server. And because the Federations feature is extremely useful in the kind of multi-tenancy scenarios (i.e., coexistence of multiple customers’ data) that cloud products are extremely suitable for, it’s important that we cover Federations here in this chapter.

Federations are the SQL Azure implementation of a partitioning pattern called sharding. Sharding is a very common feature in NoSQL (non-relational) databases, but is not often seen in the relational world. In a ...

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