The update is available now in in the AppFabric LABS environment.

• “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.

The project is on CodePlex here

Over the past few months there has been a slow but steady trickle of new tools coming to the market. On the SQL Azure front,  Embarcadero’s dbArtisan for SQL Azure was released late 2009 and provides some basic functionality for working with SQL Azure databases (object management and editing) as well as some migration utilities. RedGate announced a beta for Azure enabled versions of  both their SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare tools (details here).  In should be noted that with SQL Server 2008 R2 many of the deficiencies of using SSMS to connect to SQL Azure databases (such as database objects not being visible) have been fixed and SSMS is now a useful tool for managing SQL Azure databases.

There are numerous open source and paid apps to interact with Azure storage such as Cerebrata’s Cloud Storage Studio or the Codeplex project Azure Storage Explorer .

For Windows Azure monitoring and diagnostics Cerebrata has announced a beta of Azure Diagnostics Manager which is a desktop WPF app which monitors event logs and as well as various performance metrics such as processor utilization etc.

With Mix just around the corner there should be some feature announcements from Microsoft at least (SQL Azure backup?) which will hopefully plug some of the gaps in the Azure platform.

ALTER DATABASE database_name

{

MODIFY (MAXSIZE = {1 | 10} GB)

}

Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) have also been added for health and performance monitoring.

In addition, Database Service Update 1 reduces some of the throttling limits – idle connections are now terminated after 30 minutes instead of 5 minutes and long running transactions can be run for longer (but no news on the exact  threshold although it will be longer than the previous 5 minutes).

See the full announcement for more details.

Microsoft has made big leaps in the past few years with running PHP and even MySQL on IIS. The WordPress installation Mullenweg demonstrated was running on Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Whilst Mullenweg said there were no plans to move WordPress.com (the hosted WordPress service) to Azure he did say the they were testing Azure for blob storage.

Read Matt’s post on this demo here .

Currently available datasets available through Dallas are the  Associated Press, Citysearch, DATA.gov, infoUSA.com, NASA, National Geographic, the United Nations, and Weather Central.

SQL Azure Data Sync CTP 2 was announced with the major new feature being the ability to sync different SQL Azure databases. You can sign up for the Data Sync and Reporting CTPs here

Project Houston which is an online tool for managing an querying SQL Azure databases is now named Database Manager for SQL Azure. This is essentially a lightweight and online version of SSMS and addresses some of the weaknesses of the quite frankly under-powered Azure developer portal.