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What does Azure mean? Blue sky. But what does Microsoft mean with this? You might have heard of “the cloud”. Storing data in the cloud etc. This is a term that is very popular nowadays. The point here is that your data (or applications) are stored “in the cloud”, which means that you don’t have a relationship to where it’s actually stored or executed. I just created a database in Microsoft’s SQL Azure. I have NO idea where this database is, but I can access it through management studio or similar. There are a lot of other things you can do “in the cloud”. You can store your pictures, make it do heavy calculations etc. Some have been dreaming about having a screen (TV like) where all the actual computing is done “in the cloud”. I think it’s really interesting, because most of our computers are idling most of the time anyways.

So, why am I writing about this? Arild posted a blog about SQL Azure CTP earlier which started a discussion if we should support it. That lead me to try to make AppFrame “Azure compatible”. After a couple of hours, I’ve made my decision: If we should go “Azure”, we need to do it from scratch. There are so many things that are not supported by the SQL Azure which are imho show stoppers. For starters, you can not connect to it using management studio. Correction, you CAN, but you don’t get the object browser, and it’s very limited. The unsupported features are a long list. This in it self isn’t a big problem, because we don’t use most of them, but here’s a list of those we do use, and a little description.

SUSER_SNAME() – This is used EVERYWHERE. Literally! Triggers, views, defaults etc
NEWSEQUENTIALID() – Can be replaced by NEWID(), but you loose performance
WITH (NOLOCK) – Can be removed, but can lead to performance issues and lock-problems
FullText Indexing – Can of course be replaced by normal WHERE-clauses, but this will be a performance issue.

This is the biggest problems I’ve found so far, and I’ve only scripted tables and views. In addition, you don’t have sysobjects, syslogins, sysusers etc. Making AppFrame Azure compatible IS possible, but it would in my mind be just as time consuming as making it MySQL compatible. I’m sure Microsoft will add more features. This is only the CTP, so I hope they’ll at least add SUSER_SNAME and NEWSEQUENTIALID. The others we CAN live without.

So, to summarize. Should we be thinking to “go to the cloud”? No, at least not yet. I see it as a MySQL replacer. It’s great for small applications, but when you want to do real enterprise-stuff, you run MSSQL Server Enterprise Edition 🙂 One other thing to keep in mind is where is my data stored? All companies on in the US needs to be SOX compliant. This might be a problem for Azure. Don’t get me wrong. I’m positive about Azure, but not as an enterprise database!

If you want to test out Azure SQL, go to http://connect.microsoft.com and sign up for Azure SQL.

NB! We’ve got two new bloggers (from TGE). Looking forward to their postings 🙂
Tim Bosinius
Florian Biermaier