These are my notes from Nigel Ellis' talk at MIX 08

• MSFT Data Platform is evolving: Data is moving to the cloud
• New Challenge: Connecting islands of data and connecting them
• Data services vision
• Data Services interface on top of a data store
• SSDS vs. ADO.NET Data Services/Live Services
• Sync-Framework ties all data islands together
• Demo: Sync Framework
• Sync between platforms: Access, Data Services, Local VCF
• Sync app sitting in tray hosting sync framework; performs orchestration between data islands
• Value of SSDS
• Application Agility
• Scalability
• High-Availability: SLA
• Nuts & Bolts
• There is no schema - everything is a property-bag/hash table
• Everything is done using XML payload through REST
• There are "metadata properties" that describe the entity: ID, Kind, Version
• "Flex" properties
• Instance type can be changed on the fly (add/remove properties of an instance)
• Support for simple types: decimal, string, bool, etc.
• All properties are indexed (CN: Interesting... I wonder how they're efficiently doing this?)
• Containers
• Stores flexible entities
• Widest domain of search
• Authority
• A collection of containers
• Analogous to a namespace
• Unit of billing & geo-location
• API
• SOAP & REST (SSL)
• Operations
• Authority provisioning (CRUD)
• Container provisioning & querying
• Entity storage, update, delete, & query
• Query using simple LINQ-like syntax
• REST API
• Service: /v1 (CreateAuthority)
• Authority: /v1 (FetchAuthority, QueryContainers, CreateContainer)
• Container: /v1/{ContainerID} (FetchContainer, QueryEntities, UpdateContainer, DeleteContainer, CreateEntity)
• Entity: /v1/{ContainerID}/{EntityID} (Fetch, Update, Delete Entity)
• Used in a multi-tentant senario (LitwareHR)
• "ACE" Concepts (Authority, Container, Entity)
• Availability
• Closed beta 3/5/2008
• Open beta 7/2008
• Service refresh every 8 weeks
• Go live H1-2009