Programming Microsoft's Clouds: Windows Azure™ and Office 365

Part V

Programming Azure

• Chapter 11: SQL Azure
• Chapter 12: An Azure Datamarket Overview
• Chapter 13: Service Bus
• Chapter 14: AppFabric: Access Control Service
• Chapter 15: Azure Connect
• Chapter 16: Azure Diagnostics and Debugging
• Chapter 17: When to Use Azure Versus Office 365

Chapter 11

SQL Azure

What’s In This Chapter

• Comparing SQL Azure to SQL Server
• Managing SQL Azure Servers and Databases with the Azure Portal
• Troubleshooting connectivity issues

In this chapter you learn the fundamental differences between SQL Azure and SQL Server 2012, and how to create, manage, and use SQL Azure Databases from your applications.

SQL Azure Overview

SQL Azure is a highly available, distributed relational Database-as-a-service built on SQL Server technologies. SQL Azure focuses on a scale-out approach of adding more small physical machines rather than a scale-up approach of adding larger and more powerful physical machines, as is typically done with SQL Server.

The Difference Between SQL Server and SQL Azure

Unlike SQL Server where your Databases are the only ones on your Database server, SQL Azure may use a single physical server to host Databases from many different customers. This difference in approach is fundamental—SQL Azure is inherently multitenant, and it needs to share physical resources among all clients of the service. This fact underlies many of the feature differences between SQL Server and SQL Azure; although, a tremendous overlap exists in functionality and compatibility ...