Easy to use and affordable DB solution for Big Data

After viewing all the available sharding options for various databases, including Azure SQL Federations, I've decided that the best thing to do is to make sharding myself. I've figured out that if each SQL Azure federation is a single database and you can't join between them, I can deploy my own sharding strategy and work with MySQL RDS.

SQL Azure Easy Backup / Restore Feature Planned

It seems that Microsoft is finally doing what other companies failed to do, giving us Point-in-time restore support for Federation. So we can enjoy both a scalable DB solution in the cloud and at the same time being able to restore the DB in case of "oops" mistakes (as microsoft calls it)

Scalable Database Solution for the Cloud (DB size limit, sharding, NoSQL, New SQL, etc.)

I am continuing my my search for a database solution to fit my new application. I have to admit that I didn't think that it would take so much time. My new applications needs a DB solution that can scale to terabytes of storage and its heavily depended on fast writes, reads will be cached.