Microsoft describes Azure SQL as an ordinary MS SQL Server hosted in the cloud. If it’s true, all the functionality of the standalone MS SQL Server should be available on Azure SQL. Let’s investigate the functionality of Azure SQL based on the first task which should be solved on the Cloud Project Lifecycle. We’ll make an assumption, that we already have a standalone application that will be migrated to the cloud. And we have a database (we will describe the methods of migration of database structure and database with data separately) and we need to move it to the cloud server.

When we discussed this problem in our developers’ team, all of us had the same vision of data migration (which is available in a usual MS SQL Server). We make a backup of our local database, upload this file using the cloud management console and restore the database from file to Azure SQL Server. But our dreams were not brought to life by Microsoft. There is no possibility of database restoring from file in the Azure Server Management console. So we had to find the other workflow to tire up our proj...