Development considerations

In ADO.NET, application should have retry logic to catch errors due to service closing. Because of failover and load balancing, we can't guarantee that a connection will always be available or even accessible.

Depending on how an application supports the tabular data stream (TDS), the login name in the connection string may need to be <login>@<server>.

All design and user administration must be performed using T-SQL scripts. This means if we're used to performing these functions via the GUI in SSMS, it's time to brush up on the command syntax.

Finally, there are two sizes of SQL Azure database. If our database reaches its maximum size, we'll receive the 40544 error code and we'll be unable to insert/update data (but read operations will continue as normal). We'll also be unable to create new database objects.

Managing maximum size

If we reach the maximum size limit set for a Web Edition database (5 GB), then it is not easy to migrate from a Web Edition...