I was wondering if anyone could confirm for certain whether SQL Azure supports hierarchy nodes and how comparable it is to SQL 2008’s Hierarchy ID in terms of performance/scalability.
Basically we are looking at migrating a system that makes extensive use of the existing HierarchyId’s in very performance-critical methods and the support for this feature is a massive game-changer for the project but I don’t have access to an SQL Azure database to test this myself currently.
I have found some reference to it as part of SQL Azure SU3 released in 2010, but at the same time I have contradictions from Microsoft where they’ve essentially said it’s not supported in SQL Azure (Directly as opposed to an official announcement, unfortunately not directly to me so I couldn’t question it like I’d have wanted to)…
I was hoping someone with a bit of experience with Azure could let me know which side is true, and if the feature exists whether the performance is comparable to in SQL Server 2008?
Yes, SQL Azure supports hierarchyid as a data type and the related functions. For a description of which functions are supported, see this article. Go towards the end of the article for the hierarchy data type.
No matter what the official documentation says, you should absolutely try your database schema against a SQL Azure database. Creating an Azure account takes a few seconds and figuring out if your database schema is compatible is pretty easy too.
However I wonder what you mean by running “performance-critical operations”. You should probably test SQL Azure from a performance standpoint to make sure you are getting what you need out of it.