Taking my cloud education further … I wanted to explore the SQL Server relational database offering. The first trick was to create a new “server” from the Azure portal. After that I opened the web based SQL Azure portal to confirm it was online and healthy.
I was surprised by how easy it was to create a connection. Simply create a firewall exclusion to your current IP address … and boom … you can open the SQL Azure with SQL Management Studio locally. Pretty cool!
- Azure Management Portal https://manage.windowsazure.com/
The Azure Management Portal is proving very capable. It even has a handy popup dialog with connection strings for convenient copy/paste. Here is the process I used to import sample Northwind data:
- Open both instances with SQL Management Studio
- Right click local tables to build “CREATE TABLE” statements. Copy/paste those from local to Azure and execute. This creates the schema. There are some limitations of Azure so you may have to double check your TSQL syntax (http://www.tewari.info/2009/09/10/sql-azure-notes/)
- Use the SQL Import wizard to migrate data. For Azure be sure to select “.Net Framework Data Provider for SqlServer” destination.
- To resolve red errors, ignore [ntext] or [image] data types during migration. SQL Azure does NOT support [ntext] or [image] so I just removed those columns. Not sure of the best way to migrate this type of data yet. [ntext] should probably cast to VARCHAR(8000) and truncate anything longer. [image] should probably be saved to the filesystem (JPG/PNG/etc.) and then a URL string pointer to the image file kept in SQL.
- Click next and finish. Congratulations! You now now have sample data in SQL Azure.
