Book Image

Microsoft SQL Azure Enterprise Application Development

By : Jayaram Krishnaswamy
Book Image

Microsoft SQL Azure Enterprise Application Development

By: Jayaram Krishnaswamy

Overview of this book

SQL Azure is a database service in the cloud. Based on Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform, SQL Azure is well suited for web facing database applications. Are you interested in moving your business applications and data to the cloud but are not sure how to go about it? Look no further; this book covers all you ever wanted to know about taking your relational enterprise data to the cloud using SQL Azure. This book will show you how to manage SQL Azure using various tools and also guide you in developing enterprise applications and business intelligence solutions. It will take you through migration and synchronization scenarios with a variety of tools, help you in working with Microsoft technology still in incubation, and in leveraging hybrid applications that exist partially in the cloud and partially on the ground.This step-by-step tutorial begins by providing an overview of Cloud Computing, introducing you to the most significant Cloud Computing implementations. You will then learn the mechanics of signing up and obtaining an account on Microsoft Windows Azure and logging into the portal.The book then dives deep into SQL Azure, showing you how to provision a SQL Azure Server, and how to create/delete databases as well as set up Firewall rules so that you can access SQL Azure from tools/Client programs. It is then followed by details of how to access SQL Azure using Client and Server APIs.Other content includes, a comprehensive description of tools required to access SQL Azure and how to use them and how to populate and migrate SQL Azure databases using a variety of tools.Finally, the book will detail with examples, data-centric applications that leverage a mix of on-site data and Cloud based data, how to synchronize data and extend the applicability of SQL Azure data by disconnected applications on mobile media, and synchronize services for globally distributed data. After covering the topics of services which are in production, the book will then cover future developments as well as a complete update to SQL Azure at the time of writing this book.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Microsoft SQL Azure: Enterprise Application Development
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Cloud-to-Cloud access


In this scenario, we consider the simplest case of an ASP.NET application hosted in the Cloud retrieving data from SQL Azure. This scenario is likely in cases where the Internet client may want to access the SQL Azure database through a hosted application on Windows Azure.

We saw in the previous case that using Visual Studio 2008 SP1 we need to swap the connection string to connect to SQL Azure, as the platform does not allow direct connection to SQL Azure. However, if we use Visual Studio 2010 Express (which is a free version) we avoid this workaround of swapping the connection string. In working through this scenario, we will use Visual Web Developer Express 2010. You may download a copy of this from the following URL: http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/#2010-Visual-Web-Developer.

Using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer available from the same link, it is very easy to install other related programs as well.

In order to create a Cloud Service we also need...