Microsoft Tool Eases Management of Cloud Databases -- Visual Studio Magazine

Data Driverby David Ramel

Microsoft Tool Eases Management of Cloud Databases

Microsoft yesterday released a rough-around-the-edges CTP of a SQL Azure database management tool code-named "Houston," designed to let Web devs easily create and manipulate data-driven apps in the cloud.

"Project 'Houston' provides a Web-based database management tool for basic database management tasks like authoring and executing queries, designing and editing a database schema and editing table data," said Microsoft's David Robinson in the Azure Team Blog announcing the release.

Users can go to SQL Azure Labs to access the CTP of the Sliverlight-based tool, previewed at PDC09 and updated at MIX in April.

If you do, however, be prepared to deal with the usual hiccups in a Community Technology Preview. Robinson listed 19 "issues" with the CTP, ranging from not being able to reopen the Start page to zoom-related browser display problems.

Other bugs and suggestions have been submitted to the feedback page, including one complaining that the keyboard shortcuts don't behave as they do in SQL Server Management Studio, the tool previously used to manage databases in Microsoft's cloud (though the poster did say, "I understand that it's beta, so won't complain too much").

SQL Azure team member Liam Cavanagh, though, sees Houston as a great improvement over SSMS in regard to Data Sync Management. He said that prior to Houston, if he wanted to work with a customer who wanted to try Data Sync Management, the user had to install SSMS. "Now with Microsoft Project Code-Named 'Houston,' people can go directly to this Web-based management tool and start creating their SQL Azure databases without installing anything," he said in a blog posting.

Cavanagh expounds more on "Extending SQL Server Data to the Cloud using SQL Azure Data Sync" in a video tutorial. Other instructional videos about Houston can be viewed on TechNet.

Cavanagh also lauded the increased performance over SSMS. Because Houston is hosted on the SQL Azure data centers (just one so far), the latency is reduced from that experienced with SSMS, "which in many cases has far greater distance to communicate with my SQL Azure database," he said.

So check it out and let me know what you think. Comment here or drop me a line.

Posted by David Ramel on 07/22/2010

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.