Federations in MS SQL Azure are a way to achieve greater scalability and performance from the database tier of your application through horizontal partitioning. One or more tables within a database are split by row and portioned across multiple databases (Federation members).
OpenJPA is an object-relational mapping (ORM) solution, open source (distributed under the Apache 2.0 Licence) and extremely extensible.
Syncope recently gained official support for Glassfish 3.1.1: since the JPA layer did - again recently - move to Apache OpenJPA, we faced some issues when trying to deploy Syncope - as OpenJPA-powered web application - to Glassfish.