Azure mobile service databases - database

I am planning to use azure mobile services for one of our products. I was confused about how can I use any of my existing databases (like MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle instead of SQL database offered by Azure) which is available via TCP?
Kindly confirm.

Are you using the JavaScript/Node backend or the .NET backend?
If you're using JS, you'll need to create API scripts and import the Node module for your database. You can't use the default data scripts since they are only hooked to SQL Azure.
If you're using a .NET backend, there's no restriction whatsoever. You can use any database available on Azure or install your own in a VM.

Related

Oracle REST Data Service (ORDS) equivalent in SQL Server

I've started using Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) for a few projects. This is a middleware tier java app that simply allows access to Oracle Database objects via REST. The objects you can "restify" are things like tables, packages, procedures, views, etc. I'm curious if there is an equivalent native (or first party) feature in Microsoft SQL Server?
Thanks.

Is it possible to create an MS Access Web App using a pre-existing SQL Server database?

We need to building a typical maintenance front end (read, update, create, delete) for an existing relational database, and I have heard that Access Web Apps must "own" the SQL server database it uses.
Is it possible to create an MS Access Web App using a pre-existing SQL Server database?
Sources say the following:
In the process launching the app to SharePoint, a SQL database is
provisioned that will house all the objects and data that the app
requires. The database that is created is specific to your app and by
default not shared with other apps.
The short answer is "No". Access Web Apps are built on the SharePoint platform and the back end database is stored in an internal version of SQL Server.
Although it cannot be built upon an external SQL Server instance, you can import the schema and data into the internal instance of SQL Server.

How do I access SQL Server from Windows 8 apps?

I realize that a local SQL Server instance is not accessible to my Windows 8 app. Instead, I have a SQL Server in Azure. In SQL Server Management Studio, I just change the querystring and interact with the Azure database like any other. How can I reference that database in my Windows 8 app?
This is what the Azure Mobile Services SDK is for. Scott Guthrie did a writeup on it a while back.
Undoubtedly you're aware that both ado.net and Entity Framework are missing from WinRT... Notice the glaring absence of support for System.Data.
You can't access directly on sql databases.. Because Windows 8 Apps different from windows forms.
But you can be used web services or azure, amazon services, storage files etc.
sounds like you want to develop a web service talking to your database, deploy it to IIS on your Azure instance and then consume it from your Windows 8 application (by adding a web reference to your web service in Visual Studio).
You can also place an OData head on the database, then use various OData client-side libraries to talk to it via REST. See http://www.odata.org/libraries for both client and server libraries. SQL Server on Azure is definitely supported, as is .NET, JavaScript, and other platforms on the client side.

Database Schema Migration on Azure with Git Deployment

I am looking for a means to use Git deployment on Windows Azure together with either their MySQL or other database solutions.
I need a means of migrating database schema changes as part of deployment - does Azure provide support for this without using Visual Studio or .NET.
You basically want to use Azure as a Continuous Integration (CI) platform and my view is that Azure by itself just isn't there yet.
A basic git based CI scenario would involve the following steps.
Your src code and any database schema/data updates are pushed to a central git repository like GitHub. [Feature available]
GitHub would then push the updates to Azure. [Not supported in Azure until they support GitHub hooks]
Azure compiles and deploys the code. [Supported]
Azure updates the database from sql files pulled from the repo (remember, this needs to be automated). [Not supported]
Azure reports any error in running the database or web application. [Supported]
Azure runs user provided integration tests to check more thoroughly specific functionality and reports the status of those tests to the user [Not supported].
Azure allows you to roll back to a previous deployment snapshot [Partly supported. Snapshots are not based on git commits for instance].
I might be wrong on some of those points or new features might be added since I've written this. Corrections are very welcomed and I'll try to update the list accordingly.
I am not sure how much experiences you have with Windows Azure Websites, however when you are creating a Windows Azure Websites, you have ability to use SQL Azure Database or MySQL cloud database directly integrated with your Windows Azure Websites.
So if you will use SQL Azure Database then there are several ways you can migrate your DB following the link here:
Migrating Databases to Windows Azure SQL Database (formerly SQL Azure)
To manage MySQL you can use Local Web Server to do it. The way I have done is to use PHP, the MySQL Command-Line Tool (part of MySQL), and a web server set up on my local machine, and that I have enabled the PDO extension for MySQL. This way I can manager my MySQL directly from my own local machine and the details are explain at the bottom of this article:
Create a PHP-MySQL Windows Azure web site and deploy using Git.
Also the SQL part you can write in Workbench if you use MySQL and Oracle SQL Developer if you use Oracle SQL.
Finally Git Deployment allows you to deploy your any kind of application directly to Windows Azure without using VSx.

SQL Server install with Silverlight 4.0 OOB

I have a Silverlight app which needs to talk to a local SQL database, we plan on deploying this Silverlight app to Azure. Users will navigate to the app and install the app using the Out-of browser feature.
How should we plan on installing the SQL database on the local user’s machine in such cases? This app runs in offline mode for the most part except when synchronizing with the remote server, so a local SQL database is required.
You won't be able to use anything like SQL Express or similar on the machine from an OOB application (unless you are running elevated) as you will still be constrained by the sandbox and the libraries available to you in Silverlight are limited.
Instead consider using a compact database that can be stored in Isolated Storage, something like Siaqodb, vistadb, or silverdb.
One other thing to look at is the forthcoming Sync framework for Silverlight, which is designed to offer offline support for data from SQL or SQL Azure. See this webcast: Building Offline Web Apps using Microsoft Sync Framework.
If you are running elevated, then you can use COM to interact with the local system, so you would be able to access a full-fledged database that way. However, making sure the prerequisites were in place and dealing with managing the database would be a lot of work. I wouldn't recommend it for your scenario.

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