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I have a simple work role in azure that does some data processing on an SQL azure database. The worker basically adds data from a 3rd party datasource to my database every 2 minutes. When I have two instances of the role, this obviously doubles up unnecessarily. I would like to have 2 instances for redundancy and the 99.95 uptime, but do not want them both processing at the same time as they will just duplicate the same job. Is there a standard pattern for this that I am missing? I know I could set flags in the database, but am hoping there is another easier or better way to manage this. Thanks