Migrating schema and data

The ability to create new database objects is good, but for a number of applications we'll need to migrate an existing database. For an on-premise SQL Server, to move a database, we'd commonly use a backup and restore, or detach and reattach – neither of those options are available to us in SQL Azure. However, many of the other options we might use, such as DAC Packs or SSIS, are available to us in Azure. An overview of how to migrate applications and data to SQL Azure can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee730904.aspx.

Manually scripting objects and data

Before any scripts are manually created, there are a few scripting options we need to change to ensure our objects are created correctly on SQL Azure. In SSMS, the settings we need to change can be found at Tools | Options | SQL Server Object Explorer | Scripting. The first setting we need to change is, setting the Script for database engine type option to the SQL Azure Database option, as...