Scalability limits of federated database on Azure

Question

We plan to use federated azure SQL database in our next project, because we need a database solution that can handle a very large amount of concurrent requests - inserts, selects, updates, etc.

However, there is a hard limit of 180 concurrent requests on a database instance.

The problem is that even if we use federations, every connection must connect to federation root first (just a regular sql server database). Then this server redirect our client to the federation member that contains the required data:

-- this statement redirect us from federation root db to federation member db
USE FEDERATION MyFederation (uid = 0xFF) WITH RESET, FILTERING = ON;

Does it mean, that there is no (easy) way to scale beyond 180 concurrent requests on the federation root server?

Answer 1

You should look at the SQL Database Premium reservations, which eliminate the connection limit.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dn369873.aspx

it is in preview currently, but that doesn't mean you can't start developing on it. You don't get an SLA in preview, but with the retry block and using multiple instances it could be somewhat mitigated.