||This article may rely excessively on sources too closely associated with the subject, potentially preventing the article from being verifiable and neutral. (July 2013)
Microsoft Azure SQL Database (formerly SQL Azure, SQL Server Data Services, SQL Services, Windows Azure SQL Database) is a cloud-based service from Microsoft offering data-storage capabilities (similar to Amazon Relational Database Service) as a part of the Azure Services Platform. Unlike similar cloud-based databases, SQL Database allows users to make relational queries against stored data, which can either be structured or semi-structured, or even unstructured documents. SQL Database features querying data, search, data analysis and data synchronization.
SQL Database uses a special version of Microsoft SQL Server as its backend. It provides high availability by storing multiple copies of databases, elastic scale and rapid provisioning. It exposes a subset of the full SQL Server functionality, including only a subset of the data types — including string, numeric, date and boolean. It uses an XML-based format for data transfer. Like Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Database uses T-SQL as the query language and Tabular Data Stream (TDS) as the protocol to access the service over the Internet. (The product does not provide a REST-based API to access the service over HTTP - Microsoft recommends using ADO.NET Data Services for this purpose.)
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