In order to building a successful internet-based application, you often need to
scale-out your data processing to be able to scale your data processing needs
with your business needs. In 2011, we introduced SQL Azure Federations to enable
building application-aware scale-out solutions with SQL Azure. In this
presentation, we provide an introduction to SQL Azure Federations and also show
some interesting patterns that provide additional capabilities such as
scale-out query processing, cross-shard schema management and multi-key sharding.