Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

August 16, 2012

Using the Cloudant Data Layer for Windows Azure

Filed under: Cloud Computing,Windows Azure — Patrick Durusau @ 4:00 pm

Using the Cloudant Data Layer for Windows Azure by Doug Mahugh.

From the post:

If you need a highly scalable data layer for your cloud service or application running on Windows Azure, the Cloudant Data Layer for Windows Azure may be a great fit. This service, which was announced in preview mode in June and is now in beta, delivers Cloudant’s “database as a service” offering on Windows Azure.

From Cloudant’s data layer you’ll get rich support for data replication and synchronization scenarios such as online/offline data access for mobile device support, a RESTful Apache CouchDB-compatible API, and powerful features including full-text search, geo-location, federated analytics, schema-less document collections, and many others. And perhaps the greatest benefit of all is what you don’t get with Cloudant’s approach: you’ll have no responsibility for provisioning, deploying, or managing your data layer. The experts at Cloudant take care of those details, while you stay focused on building applications and cloud services that use the data layer.

….

For an example of how to use the Cloudant Data Layer, see the tutorial “Using the Cloudant Data Layer for Windows Azure,” which takes you through the steps needed to set up an account, create a database, configure access permissions, and develop a simple PHP-based photo album application that uses the database to store text and images:

Not that you need a Cloudant Data Layer for a photo album but it will help get your feet wet with cloud computing.

May 22, 2012

SQL Azure Labs Posts

Filed under: Azure Marketplace,Microsoft,SQL,Windows Azure,Windows Azure Marketplace — Patrick Durusau @ 10:36 am

Roger Jennings writes in Recent Articles about SQL Azure Labs and Other Value-Added Windows Azure SaaS Previews: A Bibliography:

I’ve been concentrating my original articles for the past six months or so on SQL Azure Labs, Apache Hadoop on Windows Azure and SQL Azure Federations previews, which I call value-added offerings. I use the term value-added because Microsoft doesn’t charge for their use, other than Windows Azure compute, storage and bandwidth costs or SQL Azure monthly charges and bandwidth costs for some of the applications, such as Codename “Cloud Numerics” and SQL Azure Federations.

As of 22 May 2012, there are forty-four (44) posts in the following categories:

  • Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket plus Codenames “Data Hub” and “Data Transfer” from SQL Azure Labs
  • Apache Hadoop on Windows Azure from the SQL Server Team
  • Codename “Cloud Numerics” from SQL Azure Labs
  • Codename “Social Analytics from SQL Azure Labs
  • Codename “Data Explorer” from SQL Azure Labs
  • SQL Azure Federations from the SQL Azure Team

If you need quick guides and/or incentives to use Windows Azure, try these on for size.

July 24, 2011

Neo4j, the open source Java graph database, and Windows Azure

Filed under: Java,Neo4j,Windows Azure — Patrick Durusau @ 6:45 pm

Neo4j, the open source Java graph database, and Windows Azure by Josh Sandhu.

From the post:

Recently I was travelling in Europe. I alwasy find it a pleasure to see a mixture of varied things nicely co-mingling together. Old and new, design and technology, function and form all blend so well together and there is no better place to see this than in Malmö Sweden at the offices of Diversify Inc., situated in a building built in the 1500’s with a new savvy workstyle. This also echoed at the office of Neo Technology in a slick and fancy incubator, Minc, situated next to the famous Turning Torso building and Malmö University in the new modern development of the city.

My new good friends, Diversify’s Magnus Mårtensson, Micael Carlstedt, Björn Ekengren, Martin Stenlund and Neo Technology’s Peter Neubauer hosted my colleague Anders Wendt from Microsoft Sweden, and me. The topic of this meeting was about Neo Technology’s Neo4j, open source graph database, and Windows Azure. Neo4j is written in Java, but also has a RESTful API and supports multiple languages. The database works as an object-oriented, flexible network structure rather than as strict and static tables. Neo4j is also based on graph theory and it has the ability to digest and work with lots of data and scale is well suited to the cloud. Diversify has been doing some great work getting Java to work with Windows Azure and has given us on the Interoperability team a lot of great feedback on the tools Microsoft is building for Java. They have also been working with some live customers and have released a new case study published in Swedish and an English version made available by Diversify on their blog.

The most interesting part of the interviews was the statement that getting a Java application to run in Azure wasn’t hard. Getting a Java application to run well in Azure was another matter.

That was the disappointing aspect of this post as well. So other steps are required to get Neo4j to run well on Azure. How about something more than the general statement? Something that developers could use to judge the difficulty in considering a move to Azure?

Supplemental materials on getting Neo4j to run well on Azure would take this from a “we are all excited” piece, despite there being some disclosed set of issues, to being a substantive contribution towards overcoming interoperability issues to everyone’s benefit.

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