Migration to SQL Azure/Windows Azure

Recently our company (RQSI) switched over a small website we use for client interaction to Windows and SQL Azure. I have to give MS congrats on how good both of these products are, especially SQL Azure. The Windows Azure required some code updates but the SQL Azure was almost seemless. I think we had to change 2 stored procedures (out of probably 100). Both of the changes were minor since the code used #temp tables which is incompatible with SQL Azure. I simply updated the sproc's to use @temp tables instead which helped performance anyway.

SQL Azure gives you two ways to interact with the server, 1) SSMS (like usual) and 2) silverlight management console built into the azure website. I like the SSMS integration the best even though the silverlight tool is almost a replica of SSMS. The SSMS capabilities have been stripped down for Azure though, for instance when you right click on a database table you only get a limited context menu allowing you to script creates/drops, etc instead of the full menu allowing you to do modifies, edits, selects, etc. Even though the context menus are stripped down you can still code queries the same way you would with any other SQL Server.

One more quick item with SQL Azure, MS gives you the ability to view your usage through new DMVs. A couple of the new DMVs are sys.bandwidth_usage and sys.database_usage. This allows you to monitor your usage through SQL commands instead of having to go into the management console->billing to find out whether usage is increasing/decreasing.

I am testing more tools with SQL Azure (currently working on BI Studio) to see if we can make more use of this tool, I will update as I discover more.