WHAT’S MISSING IN SQL AZURE

As you start working with SQL Azure, or, if you are already familiar with SQL Azure, you will at some point wonder why SQL Azure doesn’t have a specific feature or functionality you are looking for, such as Full-Text Search. For example, if you were to do a feature-to-feature comparison you would quickly see that at least the following features are not present in SQL Azure:

• ·         SQLCLR
• ·         Full-Text Search
• ·         Replication
• ·         SQL Agent
• ·         Encryption (TDE)

This is not a complete list, but the complete list is not a long one either. It is not publicly known the reason for the lack of certain features and functionality in SQL Azure. However, this section can at least provide information on some of the items in the above list.

The SQLCLR is in fact “partially” supported. For example, the XML and Spatial data types are actually CLR data types, and you will certainly find these data types in SQL Azure. What SQL Azure doesn’t support for SQLCLR is the ability to create assemblies in managed code and deploy those to SQL Azure. It is unknown if and when that will be supported.

Replication really isn’t needed, because of the existence of SQL Azure Data Sync Services. SQL Azure Data Sync Services works far better and is far easier to configure and use than Replication. Data Sync Services is built entirely on top of the Sync Framework and therefore includes a much richer data synchronization platform for moving data, including conflict handling and status reporting.

Microsoft is working hard at including encryption but there are certain problems they need to solve before you will see it included. The big issue really is how to support multiple levels of encryption in a shared environment. Remember that SQL Azure is a shared environment, and as such, databases are spread out over multiple instances. For example, my database and your database could potentially be located on the same server. In this scenario, the problem arises when I use one level of encryption and you use another.

These are several examples of missing features and depending on the feature, it will elicit a different response. For example, SQL Azure has SQL Azure Reporting Services, but where is the rest of the Business Intelligent (BI) stack of Analysis Services and Integration Services? Microsoft is working on them, but when and how they will be included is yet to be seen. The moral of this story is that some features you just won’t see because it doesn’t make sense to include them, as is the case in Replication. With other features you just need to be patient.