Accessing Azure Storage from SSMS in SQL 2012 RTM

SWEET! you can now access windows Azure Storage Directly from SQL Server Management Studio. This means you can now simply right click on a backup taken in SQL Azure and select “Import Data-Tier Application” to import the “bacpac” file onto your on-premise SQL Server. 2-3 clicks of the mouse and cloud zapped to local database.

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You can also now right click on any on-premise database and select “Export Data-Tier Application” to create a bacpac and upload it direct into SQL Azure. Check out the new export screen shot below.

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I’m still a big fan of the Import Wizard on codeplex (http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/) as it automatically fixes up minor issues like missing clustered indexes. However, the bacpac way is  going to be a lot more efficient for larger data sets as it is compressed. You can even rename it to a “zip” file to poke around.

Holy crap there is also a “Deploy” to SQL Azure option in SQL 2012 RTM, where you can pick also create the database and provisioning is all automated. Nice..

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So its pretty good for a v1.0, but what is it missing?

Well life would be just complete if you could right click on a SQL Azure database and the “Export” Task did an export from SQL Azure rather than dragging everything locally and doing and creating a bacpac from your machine. If anyone else would like this please vote on connect item I just added.

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