Windows Azure SQL Database Backup and Restore strategy

Microsoft offers Windows Azure SQL Database as a cloud based SQL Server service offering. Though it has built-in features to protect data from server, network and device failures (reducing overhead for setting up and ensuring high availability) in certain cases you still need to protect your data from application or users errors. In this tip we cover how to setup a backup and restore strategy for a Windows Azure SQL Database. For more information click here.

Getting started with SQL Data Sync

Windows Azure SQL Database has a feature called SQL Data Sync which synchronizes data across multiple SQL Server and Windows Azure SQL Database instances. SQL Data Sync is a cloud-based data synchronization service built on Microsoft Sync Framework technologies. It provides single direction as well as bi-directional data synchronization and data management capabilities allowing data to be easily shared across Windows Azure SQL Databases across multiple data centers or between on-premises SQL Server databases and Windows Azure SQL databases. For more information refer to below articles:

Understanding SQL Data Sync for SQL Server

Getting started with SQL Data Sync

SQL Azure - Getting Started With Database Manager

The Database Manager for SQL Azure is a lightweight, easy to use, thin web-based database management tool for connecting to a SQL Azure database and managing different database management tasks like; creating and editing tables, views and stored procedures, editing table data, writing and executing T-SQL queries, etc...for more information click here.

SQL Azure - Creating backups and copies of your databases

As a DBA you always followed a practice to back up your database (or take a snapshot of your database) before making any changes so that you can revert to your old database state if something goes wrong. Also to setup a development or test environment you use a backup of your database and restore it in the respective environment. If you are moving to SQL Azure, what would you do in these cases as backup / restore and database snapshots are not supported as of now? For more details, click here.

SQL Server 2008 R2 - SQL Azure Enhancements

SQL Server 2008 R2 - SQL Azure Enhancements
If you were unhappy with the capabilities of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) while working with SQL Azure, then there is good news for you. Microsoft has announced the November CTP for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. The SSMS of this version allows you to work with SQL Azure in almost the same way as when you are connected to a local SQL Server. In other words, now you can use your favorite Object Explorer in SSMS to browse through the database objects hosted in SQL Azure as well. In this article, I am going to show how you can use SSMS’s Object Browser to connect/browse to SQL Azure database. For more details click here.

SQL Azure - Starting up...

SQL Azure - Learning from scratch....

There has been lots of buzz about cloud computing lately and looking at the benefits it provides (in terms of cost savings, high availability, scalability (scale up/down) etc.) it is now evident that cloud computing is the future for next generation applications. Many of tomorrow's applications will be designed and hosted in the cloud. Microsoft realizes this potential and provides a cloud computing solution with Windows Azure. Windows Azure platform, which is hosted inside Microsoft data centers, offers several services which you can leverage while developing your application if you target them for the cloud. One of them is Microsoft SQL Azure, it's a cloud based relational database service built on Microsoft SQL Server technologies. In this article, I am going to show how you can start creating databases and database objects on the cloud with SQL Azure. For more details, click here.