Azure

One of the questions that I’ve often been asked is about how you can backup databases in Windows Azure SQL Database.

What we have had access to was the ability to export a database to a BACPAC. A BACPAC is basically just a zip file that contains a bunch of metadata along with a set of bcp files for each of the tables in the database. Each table in the database is exported one after the other, so this does not produce a transactionally-consistent backup at a specific point in time. To get a transactionally-consistent copy, you need a database that isn’t in use.

2013-07-24

At SQL Down Under, we’ve been working quite a lot over the past year with customers that are moving some of their applications to cloud-based systems, and mostly on Windows Azure. One message that I often hear about using Windows Azure SQL Database (WASD) is that all you need to do is point your application’s connection string to the cloud and all will be good. While there are occasional cases where that is true, that generally isn’t going to give you a great outcome. To really get a great outcome, you generally will need to check out how your application has been designed.

2013-07-09

One of the things that I’ve been busy with lately is reviewing a series of upcoming whitepapers from Microsoft.

The SQLCAT team today launched one of those whitepapers. It’s a performance guide for SQL Server when working with Azure VMs (Virtual Machines).

It’s great to see that it’s been released. There’s more to working with SQL Server in Azure than just putting it onto a VM. It’s great to see much of this now documented.

2013-06-03

If you have followed any of the Azure website forums, you’d realize that having SSL available was one of the highest rated requests. That’s hardly surprising given the number of clients that want to use these sites for eCommerce work.

So it’s really good to see that Scott Guthrie and the team have been listening and that SSL is now available. To see the details, click on the “SSL” button in the “Learn More” area of the Azure pricing page. An FAQ is also provided.

2013-06-03

I was so glad to hear today that Azure is expanding to Australia. This helps with two remaining areas of concern that I’ve heard from a variety of customers:

• Compliance and data sovereignty (not wanting to store data outside Australia)
• Latency (previously high latency even to our nearest external data centres)

With both these concerns now disappearing, it’s time for more Australian customers to get involved with Azure if they’ve been resisting so far. 

2013-05-21

I’m really impressed by the rate that the Azure team is making and releasing enhancements. Scott Guthrie posted about these again recently.

The following items in the announcement were ones that I think can be useful to those with an interest in SQL Server:

* General availability of Azure VMs. While we’ve had SQL Database and SQL Reporting available as services in Azure, we don’t have the other parts of the database platform. With Azure VMs, you can spin up a VM to run SQL Server.

2013-04-19

It’s great to see the constant roll-out of capabilities across the Azure platform.

One in particular that many have been waiting for is Active Directory. Scott Guthrie posted today that it’s now available for production use. This is particularly significant and also enables options for on-premises directory sync and federation. If you have been using Office365, you have already been using Azure AD.

Scott also mentioned that they are about to open a preview of a link from OAuth 2 (or OpenID) to Azure AD. That will enable you to use alternate credentials (such as Twitter credentials) to authenticate against Azure AD.

2013-04-09

I posted the other day about a hotfix that’s needed after you apply SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU3, to still be able to open or edit SSIS projects or database maintenance plans in SSDT.

However, I found that after I applied CU3 and the hotfix, that all my stored credential details for SQL Servers was gone. That was particularly nasty for all my Azure-related logons. I had to set them up again.

2013-04-09

One of the common objections that comes up when talking to people about storing their data in Azure, is that “we are not allowed to do it”. In so many cases, that simply isn’t true, or it’s true for a small part of the overall data. In other cases, it’s a case of no-one wanting to be seen to be the first in their industry to do so, for some perceived liability reasons. Again, most of these are unfounded.

2013-04-08

I was one of the speakers today at the 6 Weeks of Azure bootcamp event in Sydney today. During the day, as well as speaking, we have an “unconference”. There’s a lot of discussion on whatever the attendees want to discuss.

One of the offline questions I got today though was about how to hook up Azure Mobile Services to an existing Windows Azure SQL Database rather than using the one that Mobile Services can auto-create. While getting that to work, we learned a few things:

2013-03-23