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...

This video from Microsoft TechEd North America 2010 covers best practices for using the SQL Azure cloud relational database. Rick Negrin walks through the creation of a departmental application from scratch. We see firsthand how easy it is to provision...

This video by Max Adams from TechNet discusses the IP firewall rules inherent in SQL Azure, and demonstrates connecting to a SQL Azure database using Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 2008.

If you are migrating tables from SQL Server to SQL Azure, one of the easiest ways is to use bcp utility to draw data out of your SQL Server into a file and then move the data from the file to SQL Azure. However, it can be tedious to write all the bcp...

This video by Max Adams from TechNet shows us how to use the Azure Diagnostics assemblies; an important feature of Microsoft Windows Azure Platform. Max delves into using the assemblies and the Trace class to log application information within Azure storage...

Dinakar Nethi has written this article about scaling SQL Azure with vertical and horizontal partitioning. This article provides an overview on some scale out strategies, challenges with scaling out on-premise and how you can benefit with scaling out with...

Access 2010 supports connections to SQL Azure over ODBC , opening up opportunities for Access users and technology providers to create rich experiences using cloud computing. For Information Workers, this gives an easy way to connect directly from Access...

Today is T-SQL Tuesday #7 and the SQL Azure team is blogging as part of T-SQL Tuesday for the first time. This  Tuesday’s topic: “What’s your favorite hot new feature in the SQL Server 2008 R2?” Of course, SQL Azure integration is our favorite topic...

We are excited about TechEd North America in New Orleans and have lots of news to share with you but if you can’t make it, you can see many presentations online including today’s keynote with Bob Muglia . With more than 1000 sessions , this...

Cesar de la Torre (an Microsoft Architect) covers the basics of importing data to SQL Azure using SQL Scripts and the bcp utility.  Read this informative and well written blog post here .

One cause of bcp utility upload errors in SQL Azure is trying to upload too much data in a single batch. Each batch of rows from your table is a single transaction, and SQL Azure has constraints on transactions that could cause the bcp utility upload...

Siddharth Mehta does a good job of covering the basics of moving data from SQL Server to SQL Azure using ( Server Integration Services) SSIS. Included is a walk through, screen shots, and coverage of the new Bulk Insert feature. Find his article here...

Once you have your server allocated via the SQL Azure Portal you can create and drop databases from your desktop’s command line using sqlcmd.exe. This can be handy for clean slate testing where you want to create a database from scratch, unload a schema...