Understanding SQL Azure - Part One

Introduction

This article will cover the following things,

• Brief Concepts and Pre-requisites
• Implementation – Create SQL DB on Azure Platform
• Implementation – Use SQL Azure in VS 2017

Brief Concepts

What is SQL Azure?

• It’s a Microsoft’s cloud database service.
• It’s based on SQL Server database technology and built on Azure cloud computing platform.
• It enables organizations to store relational data in the cloud and quickly scale the size of their databases up or down as business needs change.
• Its hosted, managed and provisioned in Microsoft data centers.

Pre-requisites

Read the following article to create an Azure account and for some basic information about Azure to get started.

Implementation – Create SQL DB on Azure Platform

Steps to be followed,

• Open Azure portal and go to SQL databases section and click on the Add symbol to add “SQL database”
  
  

• Fill the details of SQL, consisting of database name and use the existing resource group and create it.
  
  

• New DB has been added there, see the database section.
  
  

Implementation – Use SQL Azure in VS 2017

Steps to be followed,

• Open VS 2017 and refresh the SQL Databases and check the new database added there.
  
  

• Extract the relevant details from the SQL Azure like server-name, connection-string and all.
  
  

• Go to the VS and see the Data Connections and “add connection” and chose SQL server option.
  
  

• Add the new firewall rule and press OK
  
  

• Click on the database which has been recently created and click on “Open SQL Explorer” and connect using credentials
  
  

• After connect, connection will be shown in SQL server section under SQL server Object Explorer
  
  

• Go to the database and Add/Create a table Customer there with couple of fields ID and Name and click on the Update button.
  
  

• Click on the Update Database button to create it into the SQL Azure on the portal and wait for some time.
  
  

• See how the database has been updated by excuting the script on the database on Azure.
  
  

• See the SQL Server Object Explorer and see the new table created there.
  
  

Happy learning!