Microsoft SQL Azure: Enterprise Application Development Build enterprise-ready applications and projects with SQL Azure Jayaram Krishnaswamy professional expertise distilled P U B L I S H I N G BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI Microsoft SQL Azure: Enterprise Application Development Copyright © 2010 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either expressed or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First published: December 2010 Production Reference: 1031210 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. 32 Lincoln Road Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK. ISBN 978-1-849680-80-6 www.packtpub.com Cover Image by David Guettirrez ([email protected]) Credits Author Editorial Team Leader Jayaram Krishnaswamy Aditya Belpathak Reviewers Project Team Leader Maarten Balliauw Ashwin Shetty Siddharth Mehta Project Coordinator Zainab Bagasrawala Acquisition Editor Kerry George Proofreaders Jacqueline McGhee Development Editor Swapna Verlekar Linda Morris Technical Editors Graphics Arun Nadar Geetanjali Sawant Bianca Sequeira Production Coordinator Alwin Roy Copy Editor Laxmi Subramanian Cover Work Alwin Roy Indexer Rekha Nair About the Author Jayaram Krishnaswamy studied at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India, and at the Madras University in India and taught at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras. He went to Japan on a Japanese Ministry of Education Research scholarship to complete his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Nagoya University. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Sydney University in Australia, a Government of India, Senior Scientific Officer at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, and the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur. He was a visiting scientist at the Eindhoven Institute of Technology in Netherlands, a visiting professor of Physics at the Federal University in Brazil, an Associate Research Scientist at a government laboratory in Sao Jose dos Campos in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a visiting scientist at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada, before coming to USA in 1985. He has also taught and worked at the Colorado State University in Fort Collins and North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. He worked with Northrop Grumman Corporation on a number of projects related to high energy electron accelerators/Free Electron Lasers. These projects were undertaken at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York and in the Physics Department at Princeton University, New Jersey. He has over 80 publications in refereed and non-refereed publications and eight issued patents. He is fluent in Japanese and Portuguese and lives in Plainsboro, New Jersey, USA. He is also an affiliate of the IEEE Computer Society and a member of the American Physical Society. He has been working in IT related fields since 1997. He was once a Microsoft Certified Trainer in Networking and a Siebel Certified Developer. He has worked with several IT related companies, such as the Butler International in their Siebel practice; with several IBM subcontractors and smaller companies. Presently, he is active in writing technical articles in the IT field to many online sites, such as CodeProject.com, APSFree.com, DevShed.com, DevArticles.com, OfficeUsers.org, ASPAlliance.com, Egghead Café, SSWUG.org, Packt Article Network, databasedev. co.uk, cimaware.com, and many others. Between 2006 and 2010 he wrote more than 400 articles mostly related to database and web-related technologies covering Microsoft, Oracle, Sybase, ColdFusion, Sun, and other vendor products. He has also written two Microsoft Business Intelligence related books for Packt Publishing. He regularly writes to his four blogs on Blogger; http://hodentek. blogspot.com. http://hodentekHelp.blogspot.com, http://hodentekMSSS. blogspot.com, and http://hodentekMobile.blogspot.com. He recently received Microsoft's Microsoft Community Contributor award for 2011. Acknowledgement I would like to thank Packt Publishing for giving me this opportunity to write a book, for a third time, and their continuing encouragement. Kerry George, the Senior Acquisition Editor for enterprise books—my early contact for this book—was most helpful and without her guidance and meticulous editing, this book would not have been possible. I am most grateful for her advice, which she gave generously at every step of the way. I would like to thank Zainab Bagasrawala, the Project Coordinator for having monitored the flow of correspondence successfully and for her timely reminders. I also would like to thank Swapna Verlekar the Development Editor of this book for her valuable input and pointers, which has added great value to the book. I would also like to record the help of others who helped at various stages of this book including Arun Nadar with the prefinal edits, Bianca Sequeira for more edits, both of whom worked on the Appendix collecting and testing all the links in the book, and Maitreya Bhakal, in addition to many others at Packt Publishing. I also would like to thank Priya Mukherji, the Project Manager at Packt Publishing for guiding me through the contract process, the very first step in writing this book. I thank my son for reading through the initial chapter and making suggestions and picking out errors. I sincerely thank the reviewers Siddharth Mehta and Maarten Baillauw, Microsoft MVP who meticulously went through the book and provided very valuable advice. They both have added great value to the book. Their pointed questions and well directed advice has made portions of this book more readable and clearer, and I am most thankful to them. I would like to thank my parents who would have shared my joy. I thank my brothers and sisters, and the whole-hearted support of our Subbagiri family. I cannot sufficiently thank my wife Michiko Fukumoto, my son Krishna Jayaram, and his wife Jannet Jayaram for their continuous encouragement. Last but not the least, I would like to thank Microsoft Corporation for making evaluation software available and allowing me to participate in their various events, live as well as on the web, including the boot camp. I am most indebted to the MSDN forums specially related to Windows Azure and SQL Azure and their moderators and mentors from whom I have received unstinted support. I also would like to thank Neudesic for allowing me to participate in their boot camp as well as the numerous third-party vendors whose evaluation software has added value to the book About the Reviewers Maarten Balliauw has a Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering and has about eight years of experience in software development. He started his career while he was still studying, when he founded a company doing web development in PHP and ASP.NET. After graduation, he sold his shares and joined one of the largest ICT companies in Belgium, RealDolmen, where he continued web application development in ASP.NET and application lifecycle management in Visual Studio Team System. He is a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist in ASP.NET and Most Valuable Professional (MVP) ASP.NET, and works with the latest Microsoft technologies such as LINQ and ASP.NET 3.5, and has published many articles in both PHP and .NET literature such as MSDN magazine Belgium and PHP architect. Maarten is a frequent speaker at various national and international events. Blog: http://blog.maartenballiauw.be E-mail: [email protected] Twitter: http://twitter.com/maartenballiauw Maarten wrote the book ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly with Packt Publishing. Siddharth Mehta is a Business Intelligence professional, and presently works in Mumbai for Capgemini India Pvt. Ltd. (BIM Business Unit) in the capacity of a Senior Consultant. He generally serves as a Technical/Design Lead and works majorly on data warehousing projects involving Microsoft BI. He has a key interest and insight in developing solutions using cloud-based business intelligence design, and he has been working with SQL Azure right from the time of its evolution. He started his career in 2002 with Visual Basic and SQL Server and since then he has been majorly working with SQL Server, Business Intelligence-related technologies, and Microsoft .NET. He has worked globally (India, US, Singapore, and London) on various domains for his employers to serve multinational corporations like CitiBank, Walt Disney Pictures and Television, Allegis Group, Transport for London, and others. Siddharth is also a BI author, and has authored various articles on community sites such as MSSQLTips.com, SQLServerCentral.com, SQL-Server-Performance.com, and others. He also authored a whitepaper for MSDN, titled Bulk Report generation using SSIS and SSRS 2008 R2. He has been awarded Capgemini India Envoy Award for the financial year 2010 for his contributions to the technical community by his authoring. He shares his insight on technical subjects through his blog: http:// siddhumehta.blogspot.com. My biggest thanks to my parents—Divya and Kaushik and my brother Rahul for their immense support while I was busy reviewing this book.