Note: This blog is based on behavior as of June 2013.  At Microsoft we continue to evolve and enhance our products so the behavior may change over time. The I/O path for SQL Server, running on Windows Azure Virtual Machines, uses Windows Azure storage (often referred to as XStore.)  The following...

We recently upgraded the Import/Export Service to v3 of the DAC Framework ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210546.aspx ). This aligns the Import/Export service with what shipped with SQL Server 2012. Like all upgrades, this has brought both benefits and challenges. While overall we are...

As you might have noticed, we have been moving more and more of our portal functionality to the new HTML5 portal, plus all of our new features are showing up there and not in the original Silverlight portal. Unfortunately, we are stuck for some period of time where some of the features and functionality...

While trying to reproduce an issue in Azure Reporting, I found myself building a simple worker role that generated a report using the ReportViewer control in server mode. I found a couple gaps in the overall content available, so I thought I would try to post a more complete example here.  NOTE...

NOTE: As of 1/10, this change is now live in our datacenters. Starting with the service update that went out recently, soft throttling on worker threads is changing. Over the next few months, soft throttling will eventually be replaced by worker thread governance. In the meantime, users may see requests...

UPDATE:  This was corrected in a new build of the Preview Portal that was rolled out at the end of last week. Along with the expected challenges of the services world (rapidly changing features and quick adoption of new services), there are some unexpected ones.  One of the most recent ones...

One of the challenges of SQL Azure is that not all of the TSQL that you are used to using is supported yet.  Since the underlying engine is plain ole’ SQL Server, the engine can understand the TSQL, but we just block its use because we haven’t yet made it work in the multi-tenant, multi-server environment...

I left off my previous post stating that I was going to start looking at performance and reliability issues associated with SQL Azure.   In doing this work I discovered and encountered some of the protection mechanisms   SQL Azure Protection Mechanisms SQL Azure is secure, isolated, multi...

My high school English teacher once told me that I should always have a spell checker on my computer.   This might help explain why I never make it past the first couple of chapters in any technical publication before I have to ' try-it-out .' Over the last month I have spent several of my...

I recently had two different people suggest the same (unfortunately unsupported) solution to the fact that there is no supported way of doing a linked server to SQL Azure directly from inside of SQL Server.  Since the reason the proposed solution is unsupported are subtle in the sense that it is...

I am happy to announce that CSS SQL Azure Diagnostics (CSAD) has been released. Since you cannot use PSSDiag/SQLDiag against SQL Azure, I decided to develop this tool to shorten the data collection process when troubleshooting SQL Azure issues. You can point CSAD to your SQL Azure instance, provide the...