Not every software application in the world is written in .NET and with Microsoft technologies, and of course, Azure could be used from another development environment and language. Azure is a collection of services, so the ability to use them all or a mix between them and other cloud providers is up to the consumer of the service. From a developer's perspective, the SQL Database is a fully managed relation database service, so a .NET client should connect to it like a PHP or Java application could.
It is just a matter of drivers and software components that mediate between the application and the data layer, implementing the product-specific feature of a particular Relational Database Management System (RDBMS).
In this short recipe, we connect to the SQL Database using PHP and Java.
In this recipe, we will use:
Visual Studio and IIS Express as the PHP environment
Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/) as the Java environment
PHP 5.4 (http...