The arrival of Cloud Services has been a defining moment for enterprises, small businesses, and the public sector. The landscape is changing from moment to moment. Although Microsoft entered this arena a little late, it made up for lost time by making an immense effort by building its mega data centers around the world. In handling this new business strategy, Microsoft hoisted its entire software powerhouse, honed and built over the years, on to the cloud one after another and is continuing to do so.

When I agreed to write this book, I was thinking that this will be yet another book on SQL Server, and when I finished filling so many pages I was satisfied that there indeed was a need. Writing this book started in the first CTP period and posed many challenges, as the Azure platform components including SQL Azure was undergoing rapid changes. You would not fail to notice the impact of some of these changing scenes in the book.

Microsoft SQL Azure: Enterprise Application Development is an outcome of my many years of familiarity with Microsoft data-related products and my recent passionate monitoring of this emerging platform. This book not only covers the various aspects of SQL Azure and SQL Server 2008 R2, but also covers the web application development.

A software's success depends on the tools available to work with it and in this respect SQL Azure already has a large répertoire of tools including those from third parties. This book provides a comprehensive list of tools with usage examples. Creating and migrating data are aspects that are inherent for any application as the businesses grow, transform, and scale out. This aspect has been described by including the various strategies.

On the application side, businesses may opt to keep their data as well as their applications on any location they are comfortable with, and with the Cloud as yet another location, the choices have increased, although some choices are more restrictive than others. The book deals with applications and data on different locations and how to handle them. The examples use a reduced data set and are simple but the concept is clear and quite straightforward to extend. Business Intelligence has emerged as a must-have feature of businesses. Some of the aspects of business intelligence as related to SQL Azure are treated in this book using Microsoft's business intelligence stack, the SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), and the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Also non-Microsoft languages are not left out in the book as languages such as Java and PHP have garnered worldwide interest and usage. The advent of the mobile platform, which is sure to make a shift in the way businesses are handled, and the reality that they may have to work in a disconnected mode, brings new challenges to businesses — the ability to synchronize data becomes extremely important. Microsoft has provided a robust strategy to make this possible by its synchronization software, which synchronizes data across diverse platforms from handheld to cloud spanning the oceans. The book has examples of how this is carried out using the synchronization technology.

The book covers from the CTP period, including references to the developments taking place up to October 2010, and the projects in incubation. During this period, much has happened and as a consequence some of the links in the book might have moved or broken, some of the program versions might have seen an upgrade; but the core of what is treated in this book should be of considerable value to the reader. Our technical editors bring added value by collecting all the links in the book in a central place to assist the reader looking at a hardcopy.

What is left out was a reference to the recent PDC and readers are encouraged to hear the near future developments in SQL Azure by listening to David Robinson's video on 'What's New in Microsoft SQL Azure?' here: http://europe.msteched.com/Topic/List. In closing, the author takes the entire responsibility for errors and omissions and he may be contacted at <jkrishnaswamy@comcast.net>.