Azure Support

No. Microsoft does not sell Azure as software to download and install to build your own cloud. Azure is available only as a service. You can , however, download and install a local development environment for developing and testing Azure apps locally.

Azure is stuffed with great features promising effortless scale and instant failover and disaster protection, but for me it’s Table Storage which are Azure’s  killer feature. SQL Server and SQL Azure are great products but for a lot (maybe even the vast majority) of cases they are overkill and add an unnecessary overhead and slow [...]

SQL Azure comes with a built-in  firewall, through which all connection attempts to a SQL Azure database must pass. By  default the firewall blocks all access to the database even from your own Azure applications. The first step in configuring the firewall is therefore to navigate to SQL Azure in the online Azure developer portal, [...]

In addition to SQL Azure, Windows Azure features four persistent storage forms Tables, Queues , Blobs , and Drives. In this article we will focus on Tables. Table Storage Tables are a very interesting new storage method offered in Windows Azure and are Microsoft’s Azure answer to Amazon SimpleDB..  The SQL Azure database offers a [...]

As of January 2010 launch encryption and compression are not included in the SQL Azure feature list. Encryption should definitely be introduced in 2010 and compression is also currently in testing.

As of August 2010 SQL Azure does not contain any inbuilt backup options. The closest to an inbuilt backup functions is support for the TSQL Database Copy command which produces a transactionally complete copy of a database. Coming in 2010, Azure will deliver two backup methods – Clone and Continuous Backup. Clone (targeted for release [...]

There are several methods available to migrate data to a SQL Azure database. BCP using the .exe bulk load/export tool. SSIS Bulk API’s in ADO.NET and ODBC (see below). Third Party Tools Sync Framework BCP BCP is probably the fastest way to move the data. BCP is a command line tool introduced with SQL Server [...]

One of the key benefits of Azure is the inbuilt failover protection, in the event of a hardware failure the automatic failover kicks in and a mirror of the database is brought online. This failover is not completely seemless as the current sessions will first be disconnected and then must be reconnected. If the fail [...]

As Azure is a common platform shared by many users Microsoft has implement resource utilization limits to prevent excessive use of resources. This seems a little strange on a cloud based system which should isolate users and provide effortless scaling but some resources need to be managed carefully to prevent an adverse impact on the [...]

Connecting to a SQL Azure database is extremely simple, connection can be done using the classic ADO.NET  method. When a database is created in SQL Azure a connection string is generated. This connection string follows the normal  syntax for connection strings and can be substituted for a connection string to a SQL Server in an [...]