SQL Data Services (SDS) will offer “real” relational data access in the future, according to the latest MSDN Flash newsletter I received today. This is great news, since prior incarnations of SSDS/SDS have all been restricted to Astoria/REST implementations that required HTTP access to data. These are fine for some scenarios, but most apps that exist or are being built today are built on relational databases (like SQL Server), and it would be nice if there were a simple way to push these up into the cloud when they needed to do so in order to achieve better scalability or availability. According to the announcement,

SDS will become the first relational database service in the market to provide customers with the ability to use existing investments in T-SQL development and use a full relational data model in the Cloud.

That’s awesome. I can’t wait. There will be more announced at MIX 2009 this week.