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Windows Azure SQL Reporting: It's Alive!
By Trevor Boland
Expert Author
Article Date: 2012-06-19
Though SQL Azure Reporting Services was announced in the fall of 2010, the service has, until last week, been available only to testers. As Mary Jo Foley announced in her ZDNet article, The general public will now have access to the suite of tools, including the Business Intelligence Development Studio and SQL Server Data Tools. The tools work the same way as the SQL Server Reporting works on Windows Server, exporting reports to Excel, Word, HTML, PDF, XML, and CSV formats.
Foley also notes a new feature of Azure: "a preview of a new persistent virtual machine in which customers can run Linux, SQL Server and SharePoint Server." This move along with Antares, Windows Azure Web Sites, shows that Microsoft is putting it's weight behind the cloud first approach they promoted at TechEd.
Pricing for the service seems to be a sticky point for some users. While the service is free until August 1 (the first taste is always free, isn't it?), the price subsequent will be $.88 an hour. As one prospective user points out, that will be $22 a day or $660 per month for 24/7 access. Of course this may seem paltry to the medium to large businesses the service seems to be directed towards.
With the sizeable shift to the tablet market and the lukewarm reviews of Windows 8, perhaps Microsoft's Azure will fare better against the cloud competition from Google, Amazon, and most recently, Oracle.
About the Author:
Trevor is a staff writer for the iEntry Network.
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