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6 Day Notice

SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) Maintenance Window Notification

Status: Scheduled

We are getting ready to move our Sprint 3 bits into production and we have a great deal of new functionality.

Service(s) impacted:

      SQL Server Data Services (SSDS)

Planned Upgrade Window:

    START: Thursday, July 24, 2008 at 9:00 AM (PST)

    END: Friday, July 25, 2008 at 9:00 AM (PST)

Action Required:

All Data will be deleted. This includes all Authorities, Containers and Entities. User account, user ID’s, and passwords will be preserved.  The SSDS Team understands the impact that the deletion of data will cause the development and testing efforts you have underway. This is necessary due to the enhanced functionality we are providing.  We will keep these disruptions to a minimum during the SSDS beta period.

New functionality coming with this update includes:

  • Blob Support  via the REST interface
    • Support for storing unstructured Blob data has been the most requested feature.
    • Blob Support via the SOAP interface will be delivered in a later update.
    • In the beta release, Blobs are limited to 100 megabytes in size.
  • Version metadata property has been changed from an integer to a large integer.
    • Version numbers are now based on a timestamp counter that is scoped to the owning container. Each entity within the container will be issued a distinct timestamp value which will be updated with a larger timestamp value on each update. Clients should no longer assume entity version numbers are sequentially assigned.
  • ETAG and HEAD support via REST, with similar functionality via SOAP
    • Support for If-Match and If-None-Match via the REST interface. This will allow you to verify that you have the latest version of an Entity, enabling you to use resources more efficiently.
    • Support for “Accept” header via the REST interface. This will allow you to denote what content you want returned from the service. For instance, when retrieving a Blob, the “Accept” header will allow you to choose between the Blob content or the metadata properties associated with it.
  • A new content type – “application/x-ssds+xml” has been added to the service
    • This content type is for storing XML content in the service.
    • Existing “application/xml” content type is being phased out in a future sprint.
    • The "application/x-ssds+xml" content type should be used for all entities except those containing blob content.  Blob entities should instead use a content type value which best reflects the type of blob data stored.  It's important to note that the value chosen here will be used later when attempting to retrieve the different parts of an entity by using the "Accept" header.

Please Note:

  • Special characters in SSDS User Ids will no longer be supported. User Ids that contain special characters will have the special character replaced with the “_” character during the upgrade. You will be notified via a separate email if you will be affected by this.
  • While the “application/xml” content type will still be supported in the short term, we highly recommend that you begin to migrate your applications to the new “application/x-ssds+xml” content type.

Further details on how to access these new features will be posted to the SSDS DevCenter located at http://msdn.microsoft.com/sql/dataservices.

An additional notification will be sent out 24 hours prior to the schedule updates.

Thank You,

The SSDS Team

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