The options that you need to select when setting up an Azure Storage service account allow you to specify the durability and high-availability of your data, but they don't provide for data recovery to a point-in-time. In fact, it means that some of the bad things that can happen to data are more efficiently replicated to all copies. Backup is quite a separate issue.  Read more...

In this tip we will look at two different ways of creating an HDInsight Cluster: Creating an HDInsight Cluster through Azure Management Portal, and creating an HDInsight Cluster through Windows Azure PowerShell.  Read more...

Hosting a scalable application in Azure seems ideal, but what happens when things go wrong? Azure Cloud Services provide extensive diagnostics, and this feature has now been extended to Azure web sites and Azure Virtual Machines. You need to set up diagnostics on the VM, but once this is done, all your logs, traces and performance counters can be collected from many VMs in one place for easy management.   Read more...

Troy Hunt takes a look at a website whose traffic literally increased 60-fold overnight. Interesting stuff happens when scale changes that dramatically, so he decided to share a few things he learned.  Read more...

Mike Martin kicks off his series on Azure Virtual Machines with a primer, full of background and terms. To fully understand the Azure Virtual Machines offering, Mike explains how everything is connected and co-existing.   Read more...

With any application organizations face consistent key challenges such as high efficiency and business value, complex configuration, and low total cost of ownership. Extending applications to the cloud in hybrid scenarios addresses many of these challenges, whether distributing SharePoint content across on-premises and Office 365 while leveraging search as a service (hybrid search) or externalizing data, extending it to the cloud with Remote Blob Storage or related technologies.   Read more...

In the first in a series on the practicalities of using the Microsoft Azure Platform for the SQL Server professional, Buck Woody shows that, whatever your version of SQL Server, there is a way of storing offsite backups in the cloud.  Read more...

In this article, we’ll be focusing on the different ways you can build with a Cloud Service, and what exactly happens in terms of virtual machines when you deploy your application.  Read more...

Marcin Policht provides a comprehensive overview of Windows PowerShell’s capabilities in regard to managing SQL Databases (or, in general, cloud-resident resources).  Read more...

Michael Collier takes a look at the key aspects of configuring the diagnostic agent in Microsoft Azure to collect the data you want, and transfer that data to storage on a schedule you define.   Read more...

The convenience, competitive pricing, resiliency, and ease of maintenance of the SQL Database Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform are partially offset by a lack of support for some of the features. These limitations can be eliminated by taking advantage of the Microsoft Azure IaaS capabilities and installing a SQL Server instance in an Azure-hosted VM.  Read more...

Matthew Flatt was trying to measure the performance of a tool interacting with Microsoft Azure, and had trouble getting a consistent test. His solution? Run the tests on VMs in Azure, housed in the same data center as the blob storage.   Read more...

Are all RDBMS heading towards "The Cloud"? Is this something we DBAs and consultants should be doing for our client?  Read more...

Microsoft Azure Queues are a ready-to-use service that loosely connects components or applications through the cloud. This article is the first part in a five-part series about Microsoft Azure Cloud Services by Roman Schacherl.  Read more...

This week Steve Jones asks about moving to the cloud and how interesting that might be to the community?  Read more...

Microsoft Azure Queues are more than just a class or a concept – they're a ready-to-use service that loosely connects components or applications through the cloud. Roman Schacherl provides a helicopter overview of the service.  Read more...

Just Azure, a new site from Cerebrata (part of Red Gate), provides essential technical resources and educational articles to support the Microsoft community in navigating and understanding the rapidly evolving Azure platform.  Read more...

Many people have been unsure of cloud computing and what it means for your particular application. Steve Jones notes there's a great new demo that can help you get started exploring the Azure offerings.  Read more...

Cerebrata has added support for configuring the more detailed level Windows Azure Storage Analytics, as well as managing the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) setting.   Read more...

Marcin Policht shows you how to migrate on-premise data that is already cloud-compliant to Windows Azure SQL Databases by converting it into a BACPAC formatted file.  Read more...