In this former blog post I discussed how to enable access to SQL Azure from PowerPivot. Now that access is enabled and the data is available to you, let’s examine how PowerPivot and SQL Azure work from a security perspective. Accessing the Data In order...

A good friend of mine that analyzes databases with business intelligence for a living has told me that the majority of his job is knowing the data. PowerPivot makes it very easy to add additional tables, and bring together multiple data sources –allowing...

This paper provides guidelines on the Dynamic Management Views that are available in SQL Azure, and how they can be used for troubleshooting purposes. Read it here . Do you have questions, concerns, comments about the article? Post them below and...

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...

Hi All, Just another quick note to round out a great day. I would like to introduce Zane Adam, our new GM of Marketing for SQL Azure, Windows Azure AppFabric, Microsoft Codename ”Dallas”, and middleware. Zane just made his first post to his new blog which...

We have just completed the rollout of SQL Azure Service Update 3 and now available are some exciting new features we have been promising for the past couple months. 50 GB Database Support – You can now store even more data in a single SQL Azure database...

There are a lot of articles and discussion about calling SQL Azure from Windows Azure; however, I am personally fascinated with calling SQL Azure from the Windows’ desktop. This article will talk about some of the considerations of calling SQL Azure from...

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 discuss...

PowerPivot is a powerful, downloadable extension to Microsoft Excel 2010 that allows you to perform business intelligence and analytics against known data sources. One excellent data source you can use is your SQL Azure database. This article will talk...

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...

In this video, Max Adams introduces security within SQL Azure. The creation of Logins, Databases and Users is discussed and demonstrated. The views sys.sql_logins and sys.databases which allow the display of logins and databases from the master database...

Valery Mizonov has published a paper on SQLCAT , called “Best Practices for Building Reliable SQL Azure Database Client Applications”. The paper discusses his subclassing of the ADO.NET classes like SqlConnection to handle the retry scenarios associated...

Bart Robertson blogs on MSDN about solving the retry issue with SQL Azure and the code that is working for him in a delivered over 4 - 9s of uptime live web project for the Social eXperience Platform (SXP). Read his take here .

When you generate a SQL Azure server via the SQL Azure portal , you generate a user name and password at the same time. This is your administrative account it has access to all databases on that server. However, you might want to give other people access...

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...

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) -- reading...

Available in the wiki section of TechNet, this document provides basic requirements for both server side as well as client-side settings to enable secure connectivity to Microsoft SQL Azure. Learn about best practices for administrating logins and adjusting...

When reading Transact-SQL documentation, I usually skip the Backus–Naur Form (BNF) at the top of the documentation and go directly to the samples. So, to add on to Cihan Biyikoglu blog post about the new SQL Azure database sizes available June 28, 2010...

Microsoft Codename “Dallas” enables developers to consume premium commercial and public domain data to power consumer and business apps on any platform or device. You can provide relevant data to inform business decisions, create visualizations to discover...

We are pleased to announce that starting on June 28, 2010, we will be increasing the size limit of a SQL Azure Business Edition database from 10 GB to 50 GB and that of a SQL Azure Web Edition database from 1 GB to 5 GB.  Please note that if you...

Every web startup plans to hit the big payday and exit through IPO or acquisition; SQL Azure and the Windows Azure Platform can make the acquisition process easier. What most young entrepreneurs do not understand is that when they sell their web site...

A collation encodes the rules governing the proper use of characters for either a language, such as Greek or Polish, or an alphabet, such as Latin1_General (the Latin alphabet used by western European languages). The default collation for character data...

Cihan Biyikoglu of the SQL Azure team blogs about the new pricing model announced at Microsoft North America TechEd 2010, including the new maximum size attribute to the database editions.  Read his blog post here .

Are you looking to migrate your on-premise applications and database from MySql or other RDBMs to SQL Azure? Or are you simply focused on the easiest ways to get your SQL Server database up to SQL Azure? Then, this video is for you. Cihan Biyikoglu covers...

SQL Azure provides a highly available and scalable relational database engine in the cloud. In this demo-intensive video learn how to quickly build Web applications with SQL Azure Databases and familiar Web technologies. Patric McElroy demonstrate several...