Recently I have been asked by several users if Huagati DBML/EDMX Tools supports SQL Azure. Until now, the answer was no; SQL Azure has some limitations compared to normal SQL Server 2008/2005/2000. However, after the question was asked again in the support forum this morning I decided to take another look at it.
I came across two minor obstacles:
1) SQL Azure supports only a subset of SQL Server’s system views. The add-in rely on several of these to extract schema data, documentation, indexes etc from the database.
2) SQL Azure is technically not available from Thailand until August 2011, and being based in Thailand I couldn’t directly sign up for it.
The first one is simple to solve in code, if connecting to SQL Azure the add-in simply have to avoid using some SQL Server features such as extended properties until those are supported in SQL Azure. This means the documentation sync feature in the add-in will not be able to retrieve documentation information from SQL Azure, since SQL Azure can not store it.
The second one was solved by Microsoft Thailand’s developer evangelist, Khun Ekaraj, who was nice enough to set me up with a one month SQL Azure trial pass. That allowed me to validate that the add-in worked against SQL Azure with the necessary changes applied.
As of today’s release, version 2.12, SQL Azure is now supported from Huagati DBML/EDMX Tools when running under Visual Studio 2010.
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