Security

Because SQL Azure is implemented in a different way compared to on premise SQL Server, there are a number of differences regarding security. A complete overview of SQL Azure security is found in the MSDN documentation, available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee336235.aspx.

First and foremost, only SQL Authentication can be used. This make sense, as there really is no Azure Active Directory a user account could be part of. Each time a connection is made, the SQL credentials must be supplied.

In SQL Azure, there is no "sa" account. Instead, the user account used to provision the instance becomes the equivalent of "sa". In SQL Server 2008, the roles securityadmin and dbcreator are both server-level roles, and are not present in SQL Azure – loginmanager replaces securityadmin, whereas dbmanager replaces dbcreator.

For security reasons, several user names are "reserved". We cannot create user names that begin with:

• Admin

• Administrator

• guest

• root

• sa

Connecting to SQL Azure is slightly...