A secure cloud-based file system that can provide offsite backup is better than no offsite backup, but is there a beter way? Are there more opportunities in offsite backup for improving disaster recovery, or providing a scalable archive? … Read more
SQL Azure can come up with intermittent connection problems in production. To avoid these, make sure you use the correct connection string and use ReliableSqlConnection rather than SqlConnection … Read more
How can you getting through the Azure firewall to allow remote access to SQL Azure, er Windows Azure SQL Database (formerly SQL Server Data Services, then SQL Services and SQL Azure)? The easy way is to use the Windows Azure Portal but you can also script the process to access the RESTful servic… Read more
Both Amazon and Microsoft are hosting large datasets such as those used for healthcare. Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket now gives enterprises a way of publishing or buying large datasets. This principle is now being extended to allow organizations to provide their knowledge workers with a central Self-Service private DataMarket.… Read more
Dynamo is a fast and scalable proprietary key-value structured storage system that gives the features of both simple databases and distributed hash tables (DHTs), running on SSD storage to provide other Amazon services such as S3. It it not ACID-compliant ore relational but is great for doing analysis on large amounts of simple data… Read more
As long as you use TSQL DDL to do it, creating a federated SQL Azure database is simple. What, then, of populating it with data? It is surprisingly straightforward to upload data from a BCP file via secure TDS in parallel multiple connections, even when things go slightly wrong… Read more
Microsoft's OData, the Open Data Protocol, allows consumers of data to get the metadata of data sources, to perform queries and, if necessary, to create, change or delete data items. It now provides the API for many of the available services on the internet, including the Open Government Data Initiativ… Read more
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