SQL Azure Federation – Partitioning
There has been so much news coming out of MS lately and one that does seem to have gone by with very little noise is Federation in SQL Azure
http://player.microsoftpdc.com/Session/591d586f-3732-4bff-8ee2-857f27d74df4
This is a fascinating feature that enables you to spread a database across multiple nodes. Sharding is another term for this and is one of the main reasons people like the NOSQL movement.
It will be fascinating to see whether this federation will start to appear in the main SQL Server product.