Mahjayar's WebLog. : Project Huron

SQL Azure Data Sync – Moving Schema from Compact Database to SQL Azure

Mahjayar — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:30:00 GMT

Update 12/11: Fixing a typo in the code as pointed by the commenter.

With yesterdays announcement of the Microsoft Sync Framework Power Pack for SQL Azure, we have had questions on how to move sync schema from SQL Compact database up to SQL Azure. The power pack only comes with tools to automate the sync schema setup from SQL Server to SQL Azure (via the SQL Azure Data Sync Tool) and taking SQL Azure data offline to a new compact database (via the VS Add New Item template). There is no UI tool to go from Compact to SQL Azure or even SQL Azure to SQL Server.

Just wanted to point out that its quite simple to achieve the above two non UI supported scenarios via code. Attached is the simple code that shows how to move sync schema from Compact to SQL Azure.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Data.SqlServerCe;
using Microsoft.Synchronization.Data;
using Microsoft.Synchronization.Data.SqlServerCe;
using Microsoft.Synchronization.Data.SqlAzure;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            SqlCeConnection conn = new SqlCeConnection("c:\temp\abc.sdf");
            using (conn)
            {
                conn.Open();
                DbSyncScopeDescription desc = GetDbSyncDescription(conn);

                //Check and sync enable the Compact database
                SqlCeSyncScopeProvisioning ceScope = 
                    new SqlCeSyncScopeProvisioning(desc);
                if (!ceScope.ScopeExists(scopeName, conn))
                {
                    ceScope.Apply(conn);
                }

                SqlConnection azConn = 
                    new SqlConnection("YourSqlAzureConnectionString");
                using (azConn)
                {
                    azConn.Open();
                    //Check and sync enable the SQL Azure database
                    SqlAzureSyncScopeProvisioning azScope = 
                        new SqlAzureSyncScopeProvisioning(desc);
                    if (!azScope.ScopeExists(scopeName, azConn))
                    {
                        azScope.Apply(azConn);
                    }
                }
            }
        }

        static string[] tableNames = new string[] { "Foo", "Bar" };
        static string scopeName = "FooBarScope";
        private static DbSyncScopeDescription GetDbSyncDescription
            (SqlCeConnection conn)
        {
            DbSyncScopeDescription desc = new DbSyncScopeDescription();

            /***
             * Option 1 for generating schema - Iterate through the list 
             * of tables you need and get description for them
             */ 
            foreach (string table in tableNames)
            {

                desc.Tables.Add(
                    SqlCeSyncDescriptionBuilder.GetDescriptionForTable
                    (table, conn));

            }

            /***
             * Option 2 for generating schema - If you already have a 
             * Compact database provisioned for sync you
             * could just read the whole scope description from it.
             **/
            // desc = SqlCeSyncDescriptionBuilder.GetDescriptionForScope(
            // scopeName, conn);

            return desc;
        }
    }
}

To move from SQL Azure to SQL Server you just need to replace SqlCeSyncScopeDescription type with SqlSyncScopeDescription. To access the new types under Microsoft.Synchronization.Data.SqlAzure just add a reference to the dll of the same name found under %programfiles%\Microsoft Sync Framework\Power pack For Sql azure November CTP\

Maheshwar Jayaraman

Announcing Microsoft Sync Framework Power Pack For SQL Azure CTP

Mahjayar — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:15:00 GMT

PDC 2009 starts today and Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia kicked off todays keynote presentation. It gives me great pleasure to announce the public availability of the MSF power pack for SQL Azure. Its a CTP and we are really excited to see people download this and provide feedback around the direction we are heading w.r.t providing a synchronization story for SQL Azure. Head over to http://tinyurl.com/yhn76rr to download the Power pack.

The power pack provides the following components.

SQL Azure Data Sync Tool for SQL Server - This is a automated tool to migrate your on premise SQL server data to SQL Azure by setting up a strong synchronization relationship. Kelly Blue Book demonstrated this in the key note when they moved a table from their on premise database to SQL Azure.

SqlAzureSyncProvider - Power pack also brings in a new dll, named Microsoft.Synchronization.Data.SqlAzure.dll, that contains a brand new provider, SqlAzureProvider, that enables existing database providers to synchronize with SQL Azure. This also has the new SQL Azure specific Sync metadata provisioning API's.

Sql Azure Offline Visual Studio Plug-In - This adds a new item template for VS 2008 SP1 that enables you to setup offline synchronization relationships with SQL Azure.

The team has worked really hard to bring this to you and we would love any feedback you got. You can use the email feature here or send email to syncfdbk at microsoft dot com with your feedback.

We first discussed about Project "Huron" at last year's PDC and with this CTP we have taken the first steps toward the vision of a Data Hub in the sky. We have a more detailed post about this over at our Sync blog. Refer http://blogs.msdn.com/sync/archive/2009/11/17/announcing-sql-azure-data-sync-november-ctp-available-for-download.aspx.

Mark Scurell, our lead PM, will be demonstrating this whole end to end walkthrough in his talk on Thursday 11/19 at 3 PM. For more information refer http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/SVC23. He will take you through the process of synchronizing an on-premise database with SQL Azure, generate an offline cache from SQL Azure down to a SQL Server Compact database and move data between the client, SQL Azure and on-premise server all with just one single line of code.

Maheshwar Jayaraman

Looking for volunteers for Project Huron Early Adopter Program

Mahjayar — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:55:00 GMT

Ever since we announced Project Huron at PDC last year we have been hard at work trying to scope out the scenarios for our V1 release. Due to resource contstraints we decided to scope out the Access to Cloud publish use case for V1. We instead decided to concentrate more on sharing Sql Server and Sql Server Compact databases via the Data Hub hosted in the sky. Liam, our Project Manager has a post over at our official sync blog asking for some early adopter partners. Please reply back using the contact form at http://blogs.msdn.com/sync/contact.aspx if you would like to be an early adpoter. Head over to the blog post for see some screen mockups of our early Huron Management studio UI.

Maheshwar Jayaraman

PDC 08 Summary - Project "Huron" and MSF V2 CTP

Mahjayar — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:46:02 GMT

PDC 08 was last week and I wanted to summarize the PDC sync specific announcements. Hope every one had a chance to catch up on the all the impressive videos. First, Windows 7 looks impressive and I cant wait to dogfood the Beta build.

As I posted earlier, we had 3 Microsoft Sync Framework related presentations and here are the direct links to the recorded sessions.

Microsoft Sync Framework Advances – Presenter Lev Novik

Windows 7: Programming Sync Providers That Work Great with Windows – Presenter Jason Roberts

Sync Framework: Enterprise Data in the Cloud and on Devices (Presenter: Liam Cavanagh)

I am involved in Project Huron and wanted to talk briefly about what we discussed at PDC and what’s coming next. Project Huron intends to be a data hub in the cloud enabling data sharing and replication using the Sql Data Services and Microsoft Sync Framework. Here is the full snippet of Project Huron from our Sync blog.

Project Codename “Huron” – Leverage the power of SQL Data Services and Microsoft Sync Framework to build business data hubs in the cloud. Using this cloud based data hub, “Huron” provides a simpler, more convenient and less expensive way to:

· Publish databases to the cloud along with reports, forms and objects

· Subscribe to published data and automatically configure the local database for sync

· Make online changes through SQL Data Services and propagate those changes to subscribed users once they connect

· Enable scheduled and background synchronization of data changes through SQL Data Services and then on to other subscribed users

· Backup and restore of database applications to the cloud

We showed one such scenario of Project Huron at PDC. The PDC demo shows how customers using Access database can scale out and enable collaboration scenarios on the Access database by publishing it to the cloud. Customers interested in sharing or contributing to the data can subscribe to the hosted Access database. All changes are routed and synchronized in a peer to peer fashion through the cloud hub. We also demonstrated the “data hub” nature of the data in the cloud by downloading the same Access data to a Microsoft Compact database with full bi directional sync support. All components showed in the demo were running on live code. We used Microsoft Synchronization Framework V1 to build our AccessProvider, SDSProvider and SqlCESyncProvider. Acess and CE providers run locally on the box while the SDSProvider is running in our sync service running the cloud handling the SDS store. Feedback from PDC is very promising and the Access scale out/collaboration scenario seems to be a very common problem that customers run in to. Infact, we had a couple of guest posts over at the Access team blog and feedback from that blog has also been very promising. You can read the entire post at Announcement- Storing Access apps and data in the cloud and Video demos of Huron - Access and the SQL Server Data Services.

What’s next for Huron

We are looking for early adopters to participate in project Huron which will start very soon. If you are interested in participating then please send an email to DataLabs@Microsoft.com with “Huron beta” in the subject line.

We also announced public availability of the MSF v2 CTP which has some interesting new features built in. More info on MSF V2 CTP1 can be found here. We are very excited about Huron and cant wait to share it with early adopters.