Azure Announcements at Mix 2010 [News]

Mix was generally quiet on the Azure front – Windows Phone 7 developer news dominated everything else. But there were still a few worthwhile announcements :

• “Dallas” data marketplace CTP 2 announced which extends the service with the addition of 25 new data sets.
• oData protocol announced, this is a Microsoft sponsored data protocol which is due to be built into Sharepoint and Office. More details here
• 50GB database (available from June) , the previous limit was 10GB. Of more interest would have been smaller databases under the current 1GB smallest size.
• Multiple Active Row Sets (MARS) support – this is a SQL Server feature available since 2005 which allows a user to run several SQL batches on an open connection at the same time.
• SQL Azure Spatial Data support – allows SQL Azure to using map and query based on geographic variables. This is due in June but no news on how rich the support for spatial data will be.