Jun 06, 2016

In today’s blog I will talk about the various options available for storing relational data in Azure.

Microsoft Azure offers both Platform as a service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for deploying relational database services.

With IaaS model, you create a virtual machine and deploy MS SQL server inside the VM. This model involves higher management overhead because you will be responsible for deploying and managing the SQL server. But at the same time, it offers higher management control because you will have access to the SQL Server management studio.

The PaaS model allows you to focus on database-specific tasks by eliminating the required management of the underlying database server platform. The two primary offerings in this category are SQL Database and MySQL Database. SQL Database is based on Microsoft SQL Server technologies, and MySQL Database is based on the ClearDB MySQL Database cloud service. This offers higher provisioning speed but limited feature parity with on-premises SQL Server.

High Availability and scalability is offered in both the solutions.

There are various options available for connecting to the SQL databases located on the cloud. You can use your on-premises management studio or visual studio. You must configure SQL Server firewall settings in Azure to explicitly allow incoming connections originating from a non-Azure location. The Azure portal automatically finds out the IP address of the machine from where you are trying to connect to SQL azure and allows you to add that IP address to the allowed client list.

In order to connect to SQL Database programmatically, applications use connection strings, which you can readily extract from the Azure management portals for individual instances of SQL Database.