SQL Azure shows promise for small data applications - not there for BI yet.

James Rogers — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:49:22 GMT

I am currently sitting in a seminar on BI in the Cloud by John Welch at the PASS Summit 2009. SQL Server Azure looks promising for a variety of applications. Currently it only supports SQL Server relational database services but future plans to include the BI stack of SQL Server.

I have yet to see how loading of data is handled and security is handled but it seems to have a lot of potential for small data sets (< 10 GB).

Couple of points:

Apparently data manipulation is slower than normal SQL Server.
Queries are limited to 5 minutes
Max database size is 10GB
Bulk Insert not available yet but available in an upcoming CTP
No control over physical database implementation (files,filegroups,partitions, etc…)
No Windows auth supported

SQLServer

SQL Azure shows promise for small data applications - not there for BI yet.