Working with SQL Azure

SQL Azure adds relational databases to the Windows Azure platform. It is essentially an SQL Server running on Azure servers. Microsoft keeps the management of the SQL Server to themselves at the physical level. SQL Azure helps in provisioning and deploying relational database solutions to the cloud with the automatic benefit of scalability, availability, security, replication, and so on. This brings all the benefits of cloud computing to SQL Server.

SQL Azure supports the SQL relational database model in contrast to Table storage, which provides a NoSQL-styled database. SQL Azure is highly available. With high availability, it means it is fault tolerant, replicated, and has an automatic failover. This means when data is written to the database, the same data is replicated into multiple storages such that during disaster recovery, the data could be easily recovered. SQL Azure automatically handles high availability thus, when one instance of the database is not available...