Data Access has been discontinued. Please refer to this page for more information.

Microsoft SQL Azure - Overview

SQL Azure makes the power of Microsoft SQL Server available in a Cloud Hosted offering. Working with Telerik Data Access and SQL Azure should be a familiar experience for most developers because, for the most part, it supports the same tooling and development practices currently used for on premise Telerik Data Access and SQL Server applications. However, there are some small differences between working with SQL Azure and working with on-premise SQL Server.

In order to use SQL Azure, the user requires an SQL Azure account which can be created with the help of the steps from the Create an Azure account and enable preview features tutorial. Creating a connection to the server requires that the server is reachable via TCP/IP. This protocol can be enabled in the SQL Server Configuration Manager under Network Configuration. Using the tcp: prefix before the server name forces the use of a given protocol ( tcp: will force the usage of TCP/IP transport) though others might be enabled and preferred otherwise (the order of the protocols is important during enablement). The Azure user must specify a range of IP addresses that are enabled to connect to his/her database and to make sure that these are the only addresses that try to establish such a connection. One of the restrictions that come with SQL Azure is that it does not support MARS(Multiple Active Result Sets).

This section will walk you through a series of simple use cases for SQL Azure such as provisioning your account, migrating the SofiaCarRental database from SQL Server to SQL Azure. You will create a simple Windows Azure application to allow you to manipulate the data from the SofiaCarRental database running in SQL Azure.

In this section: