It appears that I will be doing a presentation on SQL Data Services in June at VSLive Las Vegas. When I first put the proposal together, I had a general idea and outline. That was a couple of months ago and, since then, the SDS team has been very quiet. They recently announced big new things coming in a new version, probably for this MIX, so I need to go through my outline and figure out what I can work on now that is generic, cloud information and will have to change my specifics after the release. I actually am giving two talks, one on SDS and another on Microsoft's caching service but al of my demo code for both rely on SDS. So it is going to bean interesting few months, since Velocity is due to release a new version at MIX and I should be able to benchmark it against a memcached instance. My belief is that memcached will win in performance and Velocity will win on al of the features that make it not a memory-based cache. I say that because items like fail-over and redundancy, while nice, do sort of defeat...

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As I was saying last week month year in this post, JOINs in SQL Data Services are not the same as they are in SQL Server. I'd recommend going back to review that post but the upshot of it is that SDS processes JOINs differently.

Using a JOIN in SQL Server can have two possible uses. The first is to bring data together, so that columns from one table appear seamlessly with another table in the result set; the second is to filter data, the only JOIN that SDS supports if you use their JOIN command. But that doesn't mean that you can't JOIN data seamlessly between data sets, you just need to use Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT).

XSLT is a way to manipulate XML data, using an XSLT Engine to transform XML into something else, in this case, an XHTML...

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 So, I'm playing around with SQL Data Services (SDS), one of Microsoft's Cloud Databases. (see more here, signup forPublic CTP here). And it requires some shifts from the way that things are normally done. I've got a demo that I talk abouthere, but I've made some changes since then. The original demo only had one "table", a calendar of events. I've updated thatZip file to now include another "table".