Moving to SQL Azure Last week I finally got the long awaited invitation for the SQL Azure CTP. That is a real SQL server (with tables and stored procedures as we know them) in the cloud. The featureset is limited, but This is a real SQL sever and not the SDS ACE model, with SOAP and REST interfaces, that was announced as last PDC and that is now being phased out. See SQL Data Services RDBMS Model for details. With pricing starting at $9.99, no initial HW/data center cost and an option to get “auto high availability” it can be a very attractive offering for some scenarios.

Code near vs. code far There are two models that you can work with – “code near” og ”code far”. In the former model, you have you application an the database in the same datacenter in the cloud, i.e. both IIS and SQL as Azure services from MS. Without a relational SQL Azure and ”code near” i think it would be hard to move most existing applications to Azure. With ”code far” you can run you application”on premise” and use SQL Azure in the cloud. That’s very easy (just update the connection string) and very slow (since its usually quite some latency between the on premise application and the cloud based database). “Code far” makes a lot of sense for”remote tools” (SQLCMD, Management studio on your PC working against a SQL instance in the cloud). However I’m still to be convinced that running an on premise application against a clod based database is a good idea.

Tools and scripts RedGate’s otherwise so brilliant tools doesn’t work yet and only a very limited set of functions from SQL Management Studio works, so best bet is probably SQLCMD.

[Updated 28-01-2010] RedGate has released a private build of SQL Compare that I'm currently testing out. Wanna get you hands on the bits? Apply for it here.

Since the feature set in SQL Azure is limited there are many things that can’t be used (ROWGUID, Spatial data, index padding, ANSI NULL, ntext og image data type etc.). This means that a SQL script genererated from Management Studio needs to be “cleaned” from non-supported SQL.

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