Cloud Computing

W13 Deciding Between Relational Databases and Tables in the Cloud

12/07/2011

3:00 PM - 4:15 PM

Michael Stiefel

Michael Stiefel

President

Reliable Software, Inc.

When you put data in a computing cloud, the requirements of consistency, availability and partitioning can conflict. This means when building highly available and scalable applications, you may have to give up classic ACID database transactions and relational database features such as foreign keys, joins, and stored procedures. How do you then handle data versioning, and latency? The Microsoft cloud platform gives you two data technologies: Tables and Blobs, and SQL Azure. When do you use one or the other? This talk will talk about how to architect, design, and implement data storage in this new world.

You will learn:

  • An understanding of how to use the two different persistence mechanisms in Azure: SQL Azure and Azure tables.
  • How to use Azure tables, and relational databases when appropriate. If architects and developers do not understand how to use the appropriate means for data storage, their applications will not perform appropriately and will be unusable.
  • Know how and when to use transactions and how to partition data in cloud computing.