Consuming SQL Azure Data : Integrating SQL Azure with BCS by Using SharePoint Designer 2010

Navigate to either http://windows.azure.com or http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsazure/default.aspx, and log on to Windows Azure using your Windows Live ID. You should see something similar to the following image.

Click Hosted Services, Storage Accounts, & CDN, and then select New Storage Account. Map to a subscription, provide a namespace for your storage account, select a region, and click Create.

Click the Firewall Rules accordion control to manage your firewall rules. Note that you’ll need to ensure that you have the firewall of your machine registered here so you can access the SQL Azure database. For demo purposes, create a firewall rule that is open for your machine name—for example, MyServer with the rule 0.0.0.0-255.255.255.255.

Note:

You may also need to open outbound TCP 1433 on your machine. For more information on this, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee621782.aspx.

Click the Database tab in your portal, and then select the subscription where you want to create a new database.

Create a new database by clicking Create. Provide a name, and then select the edition (which will auto-populate the amount of storage available for you). Note that you’ll use the Web edition, which is a smaller, low-cost database.

Be sure to make note of the server name and admin user name. You can manage and reset the admin password by clicking Reset Admin Password.

You may want to take some time at this point to explore the Windows Azure developer portal a little more.

After you create your SQL Azure database, navigate away from the portal and open SQL Server 2008 R2 Management Studio.

When prompted, provide the name of your server, and enter the logon information. Also, click the Options button to expose the Connection Properties tab, and select Customers (or whatever you named your SQL Azure database). Then click Connect.

When SQL Server connects to your SQL Azure database, click the New Query button as illustrated in the following image.

You now have a query window with an active connection to your account. Note that you can also create a new database here via SQL scripts if you wanted. You created a database through the Windows Azure developer portal, but you can also create a database through script. For example, the following script creates a new database called Customer. You type this script in the query window and then click the Execute Query button:

Create Database Customers

Now that you have the Customer database, you need to create a table called CustomerData. To do this, type the following SQL script and click the Execute Query button:

CREATE TABLE [CustomerData](
  [CustomerID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1)NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED,
  [Title] [nvarchar](8)NULL,
  [FirstName] [nvarchar](50)NOT NULL,
  [LastName] [nvarchar](50)NOT NULL,
  [EmailAddress] [nvarchar](50)NULL,
  [Phone] [nvarchar](30)NULL,
  [Timestamp] [timestamp] NOT NULL
)

You’ll now want to create a set of records for your new database table. To do this, type the following SQL script, (adding different data in new records as many times as you’d like):

INSERT INTO [CustomerData]
([Title],[FirstName],[LastName],[EmailAddress],[Phone])
     VALUES
('Dr', 'Ties', 'Arts', '[email protected]','425-555-0101'),
('Mr', 'Rob', 'Barker', '[email protected]','205-555-0128')

Eventually, you will have a number of records. To view all of the records you entered, type the following script and click the Execute Query button (where in this script Customers is the database name and CustomerData is the table name):

Select * from Customers.dbo.CustomerData

The following image illustrates a sampling of the results you would see upon entering this SQL script in the query window.

Close the SQL Server 2008 R2 Management Studio, because you are now done adding records.