Computerworld has a nice article today on Microsoft's SQL Server Data Services. It contains a number of references and a direct link to the MS home page for the (future) product.
This product sounds very exciting. It's all part of the Microsoft's push into cloud computing. Although the entirety of Microsoft's Cloud Services have yet to be revealed they are much talked about. This first glimpse shows that MS is taking this seriously by building in the REST / SOAP standards. Their is clearly a vision that the future of the web (web 3.0 for most) will be made up of small bits of very descriptive data, typically stored in XML. As you can tell from the FAQs, this is part of the push.
For a long time, I've been saying "What tool or service or pattern will force me to utilize LINQ ?". Well, I love my TSQL and I love my DAL, but I can still utilize those and SSDS if I learn a bit of LINQ.