First Azure Database

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog.


Getting my feet wet with Azure SQL tonight and I just created my first ever database on the platform. The first step was to create a new server instance since I did not yet have a hosting server. The second page of the creation prompts you to provide credentials for the new server. With no instructions about what to use as a "log in name" I used my gmail account as I would for almost any account name. The database created successfully but I quickly found I couldn't access it at all. I just kept getting authentication errors. I noticed in one of the errors that the user name reported in the failure was the login name I'd initially entered with the "@gmail.com" truncated. This made me wonder if Azure was understanding the "@" character as a domain indicator.

I went back to the Azure portal, deleted the server and started from scratch creating another new server. This time around I used just "dane.vinson" as the login name. Bingo! Everything worked correctly and I was able to upload my database and access it without issue.

There's definitely a miss in the credentials validation during the server creation process IMO. If the authentication protocols are going to universally understand "@" as a domain indicator credentials validation should really be catching that.

Other than this initial annoyance the process worked flawlessly and my SQL database was up and running on Azure in just a few minutes. I'm now able to connect directly to my database through SQL Management Studio (very cool)  and the browser-based management tool for Azure databases is slick. So far I'm pretty impressed with Azure SQL.

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