[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] SQL Azure doesn’t currently support page level or row level compression like the enterprise edition of SQL Server 2008. However, you can implement your own column level compression in your data access layer to take advantage of the performance and...

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] In this example application, I am going to build a Bing Maps tile server using Windows Azure that draws push pins on the tiles based on coordinates stored as spatial data in SQL Azure. Bing Maps allows you to draw over their maps with custom tiles;...

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] SQL Azure databases are capped in size; one reason for this is that we don’t want to send you a surprise bill if your data grows beyond your expectations. You can always increase or decrease the cap of your database (up to 50 Gigabytes); however...

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a stateless protocol; the advantage of a stateless protocol is that web servers do not need to retain information about users between requests. However, in some scenarios web site developers want to maintain state...

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] Currently, SQL Azure doesn’t have the concept of a SQL Server Agent. In this blog series we are attempting to create a light-weight substitute using a Windows Azure worker role. In the first blog post of the series, I covered how the Windows Azure...

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] Currently, SQL Azure doesn’t have the concept of a SQL Server Agent. In this blog series we are attempting to create a light-weight substitute using a Windows Azure Worker role. In the first blog post of the series, I covered how the Windows Azure...

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] Currently, SQL Azure doesn’t support running SQL Server Agent in the cloud. If you need SQL Server Agent type functionality for SQL Azure, you can use a Windows Azure worker role and some custom code, I will show you how in this blog post series....

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] SQL Azure has two types of access control: SQL Authentication logins and passwords and a server side firewall that restricts access by IP address. This blog post will discuss how to programmatically modify the firewall settings. For information about...

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] Geographic redundancy is a fancy word for distributing your data across multiple data centers globally. One way to accomplish this is to spread your data across many SQL Azure data centers using Data Sync Service for SQL Azure to synchronize a hub...

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] In this blog post, we are proving code for a sample WinForm application that streams images from SQL Azure to a PictureBox control. Our goal is to show how you can stream large BLOB data from a varbinary(max) column in SQL Azure to the WinForm application...

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] SQL Azure currently supports 1 GB and 10 GB databases, and on June 28 th , 2010 there will be 50 GB support. If you want to store larger amounts of data in SQL Azure you can divide your tables across multiple SQL Azure databases. This article will...

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] I have written a simple console application (run from the command line) to upload multiple BLOBs from files into SQL Azure. This article discusses how it works, provides a complete Visual Studio solution of the console application and the source code...

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] One of the more interesting things that we can do with the SqlStream class introduced in this blog post is to write to Windows Azure Storage from SQL Azure. Windows Azure storage provides persistent, durable storage in the cloud. To access the storage...

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] Because of the remoteness of SQL Azure it is beneficial to have some tricks in your coding toolbox for dealing with large binary objects, the varbinary(max) data type in SQL Azure. One of these is to be able to stream large binary objects (BLOB) ...

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] If you have been paying close attention, you will have noted that SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2 has added a new property for connections to SQL Azure -- the Session Tracing ID. A session tracing identifier is a unique GUID that is generated...

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] SQL Azure currently supports 1 GB and 10 GB databases. If you want to store larger amounts of data in SQL Azure you can divide your tables across multiple SQL Azure databases. This article will discuss how to use a middle layer to join two tables...

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.] When using a web enabled database like SQL Azure, it requires connections over the internet or other complex networks and because of this, you should be prepared to handle unexpected dropping of connections.  Established connections consist of...