http://ayende.comAyende @ RahienCopyright (C) Ayende Rahien 2004 - 2021 (c) 202660Jonessie, If you are serious, we can talk about sponsoring the Shards development. Putting money into this is the way to make sure that it will happen fast. http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment24http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment24Sat, 26 Sep 2009 12:29:52 GMTAny chance you could finish Shards this week ?? :) We need this, like now! We are creating the ultimate Azure killer app - no really! Lots of database partitions in the cloud - for performance reasons mostly - need to sell lots of stuff in a very short period. I need to create an automatic partitioning and de-partition mechanism so we can move slices of the database in and out of the cloud as demand increases or decreases. I think sharding might help with this. Cheers http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment23http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment23Sat, 26 Sep 2009 12:08:24 GMTIt should be noted that amazons simpledb (cloud schemaless db) also has a 10gig limit per domain (database). You reach that limit pretty fast in a scema-less world. Sharding your fact data is a good idea for both scale and performance. http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment22http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment22Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:12:44 GMT@Mike Brown No, there is no translation, it is just SQL installed on their virtual instances. The original SSDS (SDS) was schema less and built to scale. When presented at PDC it wasn't fleshed out, didn't really do joins the way people wanted, but it scaled "automatically" (as long as you embraced the new way of thinking). The fact that it was schema less and the relational bits weren't really there made people confused with the differentiation between Azure Table Storage and SQL Data Services. It looks like SDS wasn't going to be mature enough to meet the Azure schedule and people weren't really interested in learning the different paradigm so we get SQL Azure which has no 'seamless scaling' capabilities that every other Azure service has. It kind of sticks out like a sore thumb to me. I'm sure more details / roadmap will be unveiled at PDC, because I don't think SQL Azure is the long term goal. Complete speculation though. http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment21http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment21Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:45:46 GMTMike, The place to discuss this is the nhibernate contrib mailing list. [http://groups.google.com/group/nhcdevs](http://groups.google.com/group/nhcdevs) As for what SQL Azure is, it is most definitely not sitting in front of the schemaless storage. There is just no way it could work. The 10GB limit makes me think that they simply put some version of SQL Server and handle replication on the fly. That way they can still benefit from what SQL Server can do. http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment20http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment20Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:59:38 GMTDario, I think this would be great, and it seems like a lot of people are willing to help http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment19http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment19Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:55:24 GMTThe place to discuss this is the nhibernate contrib mailing list. [http://groups.google.com/group/nhcdevs](http://groups.google.com/group/nhcdevs) http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment18http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment18Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:54:31 GMTHi, I have worked with NHibernate during the last 3 years and I really like to contribute. Where do we start? http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment17http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment17Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:40:15 GMTI'm in debt with NHibernate: it saved me many work hours. If I can contribute in any way, please tell me where I can sign up. http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment16http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment16Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:37:53 GMTWould definitely be interested in contributing... How/Where do I get started? Anything to help the NHibernate community. Have used NHibernate extensively over the last few years - it would be nice to give something back! http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment15http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment15Tue, 08 Sep 2009 07:20:11 GMTI'm definitely game, where do I sign up? @eyston There's a lot of info regarding SQL Azure. Long story short, they tried a schema-less and got a very vocal response from those who wanted "SQL in the cloud". Reading in between the lines of the announcement of the transiton, Microsoft said that SQL Azure will support TDS (the protocol of SQL server). I imagine that they have an engine in front of the schema-less data storage that handles the translation for you. It's not a compromise, it's the best of both worlds. My hope is that the schema-less API will be re-enabled at some point in the future. http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment14http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment14Mon, 07 Sep 2009 22:00:39 GMTDario, I glanced nhshards repo and seems that it has quite much of the base work done. IMO it would be good to sync those changes to the contrib. http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment13http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment13Mon, 07 Sep 2009 16:45:35 GMTHi Ayende, glad to read this post ! I began with NH.Shards long time ago and I couldn't finish it yet. I moved some commits to this svn because a friend was helping me with some code... [http://code.google.com/p/nhshards](http://code.google.com/p/nhshards) But I will commit those changes to the trunk/ on NH.Contrib if you like then somebody can continue, and I will be happy to help ;-) http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment12http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment12Mon, 07 Sep 2009 13:20:10 GMTI'd like to help make NHibernate Shards alive! http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment11http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment11Mon, 07 Sep 2009 13:15:51 GMTI would have thought Shard or Sharding came from MMOG's like Ultimate Online, which you logged onto different shards. These were deployed to manage player load, and locality to the server (ping time), basically the same scaling problem, and around the same time 1996/1997. http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment10http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment10Mon, 07 Sep 2009 07:33:29 GMTI am not very experienced, but I am eager to learn and would love to contribute, where do I sign up ? http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment9http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment9Mon, 07 Sep 2009 02:27:18 GMTWould be happy to help! http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment8http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment8Sun, 06 Sep 2009 20:06:30 GMTI could use this! How can I help? http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment7http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment7Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:18:31 GMTI'm pretty busy with the Linq to NHibernate work at the moment, but if there's still a need for contributors once I've got that nailed, then I'd be up for it. Already ported a lot of Hibernate Java code over to NH, so it's something I'm pretty used to :) http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment6http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment6Sun, 06 Sep 2009 09:23:20 GMTwould be happy to volunteer if i can contribute, how can i help? http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment5http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment5Sun, 06 Sep 2009 09:18:08 GMTThat would be much better than my proposal :) (see comments in [ayende.com/.../...nate-on-the-cloud-sql-azure.aspx](http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2009/09/05/nhibernate-on-the-cloud-sql-azure.aspx)) http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment4http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment4Sun, 06 Sep 2009 08:48:21 GMT> why move to Azure and keep the relational model. In many apps, you have a few tables that hold 99% of your raw data. Those are obvious candidates for Blob Storage or Table Storage under Azure. Then, the other 50 tables just aren't worth the migration because they don't hold that much data. This is more or less our situation at Lokad.com and the approach we have adopted while migrating to Azure. http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment3http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment3Sun, 06 Sep 2009 08:07:05 GMTSounds great. I'll tweet you directly. http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment2http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment2Sun, 06 Sep 2009 03:08:31 GMTNever really understood why move to Azure and keep the relational model. It seems if I'm going to move to Azure it is for benefit of building a scalable application which would mean Azure Storage (tables). If I just want to take an existing app and 'cloud it up' EC2 is a better fit. SQL Azure just seems like a compromised solution. They started with a different goal but it didn't work (at the initial stages it was hard to differentiate between tables which lead to confusion and the later stages never came) so now its just 'SQL in the cloud'. http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment1http://ayende.com/4178/sql-azure-sharding-and-nhibernate-a-call-for-volunteers#comment1Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:44:40 GMT