astro posted on July 21, 2010 12:52
CTP 1 of Houston is downloadable from Microsoft’s SQL Azure Labs site. It will allow developers to interact directly with SQL Azure, Microsoft’s cloud database.
Here’s how Microsoft officials describe Project Houston in the SQL Azure Team Blog: “a web-based database management tool for basic database management tasks like authoring and executing queries, designing and editing a database schema, and editing table data.”
There is no estimated ship date for the final version of Houston. Blogs, we found at WPC, are the best places to gather intelligence on upcoming releases. (example: http://tiny.cc/1vxlg This guy knows the inside scoop on Azure, Houston, Dallas and other clandestinely-named Microsoft projects.)
Dallas is a service for discovering, purchasing and buying “premium data subscriptions” (both public and private data) that can be used by those developing and running applications on Windows Azure. Dallas includes a common marketplace and a provisioning/billing framework.
Companies which already have committed to providing data to Dallas include NASA (anyone else sensing a theme here?), National Geographic, Associated Press, Zillow.com, and Weather Central.