Azure Tools Start to Arrive [News]

A major impediment to Windows Azure’s adoption is the lack of tools to assist developers and admins, for example – DBA’s have to jump through hoops to back up a SQL Azure database as there are no backups tools are SQL Azure doesn’t yet have a native backup facility.

Over the past few months there has been a slow but steady trickle of new tools coming to the market. On the SQL Azure front,  Embarcadero’s dbArtisan for SQL Azure was released late 2009 and provides some basic functionality for working with SQL Azure databases (object management and editing) as well as some migration utilities. RedGate announced a beta for Azure enabled versions of  both their SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare tools (details here).  In should be noted that with SQL Server 2008 R2 many of the deficiencies of using SSMS to connect to SQL Azure databases (such as database objects not being visible) have been fixed and SSMS is now a useful tool for managing SQL Azure databases.

There are numerous open source and paid apps to interact with Azure storage such as Cerebrata’s Cloud Storage Studio or the Codeplex project Azure Storage Explorer .

For Windows Azure monitoring and diagnostics Cerebrata has announced a beta of Azure Diagnostics Manager which is a desktop WPF app which monitors event logs and as well as various performance metrics such as processor utilization etc.

With Mix just around the corner there should be some feature announcements from Microsoft at least (SQL Azure backup?) which will hopefully plug some of the gaps in the Azure platform.