What is SQL Azures approach to scale? Is there a limitation on the size of data that can be stored in SQL Azure?
SQL Azure is optimized for applications that need high scale and high availability at a lower cost than traditional scale up architectures. To this end SQL Azure provides a highly available, and scale out solution on commodity hardware and to get maximum benefit from this platform there is a natural drive towards solutions that scale out using smaller partitions versus the traditional single server scale up model.SQL Azure supports data sets up to terabytes in size. Individual SQL Azure databases can be up to 50GB in size. Data sets larger than 50 GB can be partitioned across multiple Azure databases using industry standard approaches. For example, a SaaS ISVs can easily provision each customer their own database or a retailer can partition sales data into databases based on regions.It is also important to note that the 50GB limit per database does not include additional copies of data that are automatically maintained for higher availability, the transaction log or system level tables
