I have a question: when will XNA be open-sourced? There are tons of people that want a sequel and MonoGame could use a quality boost.

http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi...

Also C# on XBox One had been promised like a year ago but nothing happened:

http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi...

What is the point of User Voice then?

A huge sticking point for us right now is that Azure has no data warehousing capabilities. You're basically limited to "spin up a huge, expensive VM and install SSAS on it and make sure you have an expert DBA around that knows his way around all the little nuances of MS-SQL and SSAS".

It is honestly, in my opinion, Azure's current biggest failing. We use cutting edge features and marketplace offerings when we can and the space seems ripe for disruption with companies like Birst, Spotfire, and others really going on the offensive. Microsoft has one of the most mature Data Warehousing offerings for the traditional environment, and it seems crazy that after 5 years there's nothing built into Azure for it.

All that said, do you know of any plans, timelines, or similar services to a fully hosted SSAS-like Data Warehousing solution?

Azure has multiple database-as-a-service offerings including SQL (azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/sql-database/), DocumentDB (azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/documentdb/), and Redis Cache (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cache/).

Those aren't OLAP replacements though, right? You would still need to manually build an OLAP db from the lower level to report on them. Maybe I'm wrong since I haven't used Azure...

You're right, Azure SQL is very limited in terms of being quite different from non-hosted SQL offerings. You can't just throw OLAP on top.

Azure is a PAAS, right? OLAP should be one of the native offerings from Microsoft.

Google has BigQuery and AWS has Redshift.

Yes they should. It's literally the only big thing lacking IMO at the moment...hell they even have a fully automated machine learning pipeline offering that can auto-generate APIs from trained models...But no OLAP :-/

This might be what you are looking for, but I think Azure Marketplace has Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, etc.

AWS does offer some very special purpose data stores like DynamoDB and SimpleDB but I have not used them much.

I may have to look into the Cassandra one, since there is apparently a Data Warehousing framework called Spark that is built on top of it. The others are not suitable to OLAP processing or data warehousing I believe.

Hi Felix, Azure SQL is very, very different from a regular MS SQL Server environment.

It is a lot more restrictive and thus many tools (such as your own SQL Management Studio) do not work well with it.

Is there any plan to make these two siblings more compatible with eachother?

Furthermore, Azure SQL is very unclear about its performance guarantees. Your DTU's have no mapping to anything in the real world which we can compare. Are there any plans of addressing that?

I couldn't agree more.

I tried to get an Azure WebSites with an Azure SQL instance of Wordpress working. Getting PHP to run on Azure WebSites was easy/pleasant, getting Azure SQL to talk to PHP was an absolute nightmare and then even once that is done you have issues with instance naming and paths.

To be honest I completely gave up. I spent three days on the above setup, and never did get Wordpress working. Then after I gave up I spent one afternoon setting up the same thing using an Azure VM.

I like the concept of Azure Websites, but Azure SQL is just "meh." It isn't compatible with MS SQL which is a big problem frankly. A lot of stuff supports MS SQL out of the box, but it seems like Azure SQL is something else entirely.

PS - Azure does have an MySQL compatible offering, but it is by a third party. Nothing by MS themselves. So the pricing model is awkward.

For what it's worth, I am in BizSpark and I have found using the Ubuntu VPSs to be totally hassle free. One question: on AWS, I used to use cron jobs to take snapshots of Postgres, etc. data stores and stuff them in S3 as an ad hoc twice a day backup. Is there something similar on Azure?

I've never been a huge fan of the "snapshot and pray" school of backups. This tool does it right and supports S3 and Azure storage (equivalent to S3).

https://github.com/wal-e/wal-e

Also: Azure SQL is $15/month and includes restoration of the database to any point in time in the last 14 days. I LOVE Postgres but finally gave into this value proposition.

Thanks, I am looking at Azure SQL right now.

Last time I used Azure websites was a year ago - the command line tools were fine, the UI had a lot of random 500s - but the main thing was having to commit all my generated resources because Azure wouldn't run gulp or grunt. Is that sorted out now?

In my corner of the valley it seems to be working. Keep it up!