I wrote previously about the potential of SQL Data Services, the sql-in-the-cloud offering from Microsoft. Today, Shankar Pal, the Principal Program Manager for SQL Data Services (SDS) team mentioned in the SQL Data Services blog that Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive (EHA) is built in the cloud, using SDS. He writes about how well the SDS relational database service platform scales and provides some simple design principles to achieve maximum scalability .

Make no mistake about it, this is a big deal. Email archiving is big business, and since Microsoft is betting on SDS platform to build it, I truly believe the SDS is already stable enough to use it in your own cloud applications. Exchange Hosted Archiving from Microsoft is a very rich service for e-mail archiving, e-discovery and regulatory compliance for corporate customers and large organizations. I’m sure Microsoft will provide other types of hosted archiving, like file archiving, IM archiving, any type of data archiving, which is a must nowadays for any company.

I was never a believer in full-text queries or using SQL to find anything in real time, however, because in SDS queries are scattered over many server partitions, with the right design you can actually implement a pretty good text-search search engine (or you can wait for an Azure Hadoop/Lucene implementation). Also, always ask yourself, do you really need it in real-time?

The new generation email archiving will be available later this summer, a good showcase for SDS.

You can read Shankar’s blog entry here.