Tuesday we released new database pricing. The smallest DB (100MB) is now $5/month. For more details http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/

thanks, we hear you loud and clear. Free text search is planned for SQL Azure. Right now I can’t give you a date.

SQL Azure added federations in Dec 2011, which is our implementation of the sharding application pattern

We do still intend to support secondary indexes. However, no firm timeline has been established for when that capability will be made available. Based on our most current information, secondary indexes are not going to be released as a feature in 2011.

There are at least three ways to enable e-mail for your Azure applications:

1.Using a custom on-premise Email Forwarder Service.

2. Using Email Server’s Web Services APIs

3.Using a third party SMTP Service

All are described in more depth here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2010/10/08/adoption-program-insights-sending-emails-from-windows-azure-part-1-of-2.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

Please help us understand what scenarios (if any) these patterns don’t address for your applications.