Data in the Azure Cloud, by Julie Lerman

Julie Lerman, New England Code Camp 10/17/2009
Data in the Azure Cloud
Julie Lerman
jlerman@thedatafarm.com

Julie Lerman
website
theDataFarm.com
blog & twitter
theDataFarm.com/blog@julielermanVT
book web site
LearnEntityFramework.com
consultant/mentor
Microsoft MVP, INETA Speaker,ASPInsider, MCP, VTdotNET Leader

Agenda
What is Azure?
Type of Services
Types of Storage
Storing/Accessing Azure Tables
Working Directly with SQL Azure
Data through Services

Azure Platform
Web Host on Steroids
Hardware + Cloud Operating System
“Reliable, Highly Available, Scalable & Fault Tolerant”
Simple deployment
Azure “Fabric”
Integration of all that impact your service
Automatically adjusts resources as needed

Azure Platform Components
Host your apps & services
Storage
Relational Database in the Cloud
Access Control Services
Service Bus

Windows Azure for Your Apps
Web Role
App or Service with an external endpoint
Web App, Web Service, WCF Service, RIA , etc.
Worker Role
Provides background processing for apps
No external endpoints
Cloud Service
“Wrapper” service that defines the roles

Ramping Up for App Development
msdn.microsoft.com/azure
Get a token for Azure accounts
CTP is Free (microsoft.com/azure/register.mspx)
Visual Studio 2008 SP1
Or Web Developer Express 2008 SP1
Windows Azure SDK
Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio
Windows Azure Training Kit

Hello Azure
Demo

Storage in Azure

Developing for Azure Tables
Azure Table data built from your classes
Access via ADO.NET Data Services
Read & write to table as you would to ANDS
Leverage StorageClient API in SDK Samples
Define dev & cloud tables in code
Dev Default: SQL Server Express 2005/2008
Best Practices White Paper
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=153401

Using Azure tables
Demo

Porting Storage to the cloud
Modify Configuration
AccountName=julielerman
AccountSharedKey=[primary access key]
TableStorageEndpoint > http://table.core.windows.net
More Details in Critical MSDN Doc: Deploying a Service on Windows Azure, Author: Jim Nakashima

Connect to SQL Azure
SQL Server 2008
SQL Azure is not totally compatible with design tools (yet)
Can’t access with VS2008 DB design tools
SSMS DB Login fails. Begin with query

Developing for SQL Azure
VS IDE does not work directly with cloud
Develop and Test with local database
Switch connection string to use cloud db
SQL Azure has a subset of SS Features
Not all SQL Server types are supported
MARS is not supported
Entity Framework leans on MARS
Be sure to code around this limitation

Using SQl azure
Demo

Migrating Databasesto SQL Server
“Migrating Databases” HOL in Training Kit
Detailed walk through
Generate SQL Script to Create Database
Modify to remove unsupported features
UDFs, Windows Authentication, File Groups, ANSI_NULLS, ROWGUIDCOL, NOT FOR REPLICATION, XML SCHEMA COLLECTION and more…

Using Blobs as a DataSource
XML File can be a blob
Entry in service configuration file
Be sure Blob service is running locally
Read and write streams to the blog
Change endpoint in config to go live

Summary
Azure marketing is overwhelming
Look at the pieces that you need
Biggest benefit is enormous scale
Tight integration with Visual Studio
Familiar and new paradigms
And…it’s not free (but the CTP is )

Resources
Windows Azure Toolkit
Microsoft.com/azure
Msdn.microsoft.com/azure
“How Do I” videos on msdn/azure
Roger Jennings (oakleaf.blogspot.com)
Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform (WROX)
Blogs.msdn.com/ssds, learnazure,cloud, windowsazure

Julie Lerman
website
theDataFarm.com
blog & twitter
theDataFarm.com/blog@julielermanVT
book web site
LearnEntityFramework.com
consultant/mentor
Microsoft MVP, INETA Speaker,ASPInsider, MCP, VTdotNET Leader