azure – Page 2 – Ash Tewari

PackRaft with Xamarin and Microsoft Azure

PackRaft is a cross-platform mobile application built with Xamarin. It integrates with Microsoft Azure services, such as Azure Table Storage and Azure App Service. It is created with Xamarin.Forms for iOS and Android (Windows version will be coming soon).

The purpose of creating this sample application was to expand expertise in cross-platform mobile development with Windows Azure integration, specifically with Xamarin.Forms and Azure App Service. With Xamarin.Forms, it is possible to achieve close to 100% code reuse across these platforms for certain type of apps. Azure App Service provide a set of rich cloud backend services for your mobile applications.

PackRaft allows the user to setup a fleet of vehicles of various seating capacities. Groups of riders are assigned to these rides according to the count of riders in each group. You can specify that certain groups be kept together on a single vehicle – and the app tries to honor those requests if possible. I did this via a rudimentary implementation of a bin packing algorithm. This implementation is deployed as an API App in Microsoft Azure.

PackRaft uses Azure Mobile Services SDK to persist Fleet data to Azure Table Storage and to authenticate users with Facebook and Microsoft accounts. Twitter and Google account authentication is also supported by Azure Mobile Services SDK out of the box and those will also be enabled in PackRaft soon.

PackRaft is available on Android, iPhone and iPad.

NoSQL in Windows Azure

You may have questions like these – What are my NoSQL options in Windows Azure? Can I run MongoDB on linux on Windows Azure? Why would I want to do that? Which one of the NoSQL options are available as managed services? Are all kinds of NoSQL databases available? Are there any limitations? What are options for data analytics?
Or may be you have questions like these – Is it true that NoSQL databases don’t have schema? Do they have indexes? What about Views? Should I choose MongoDB or Redis? What is eventual consistency?
In this presentation, you will learn all about NoSQL technologies in Windows Azure Cloud Platform. And you will get get answers to questions like these.
Carolina Code Camp – 2014

SQL Azure Notes

My invitation code for SQL Azure CTP finally arrived. I had been waiting for this.

You can create a database in from the SQL Azure Management page, shown above.

After you have created the database, of course, you can use DbUpdater with your SQL Azure databases. Here is the command-line :
DbUpdater.exe ..\SqlScripts /server:”tcp:SERVER.ctp.database.windows.net” /db:DATABASE /user:”USER@SERVER” /password:PASSWORD /confirm:true

And you will need this DbUpdater.exe.config file :

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?>
<configuration>
<appSettings>
<add key=”file-prefix” value=”db” />
<add key=”file-extension” value=”sql” />
<add key=”schema-versions-name” value=”schema-versions-table.sql” />
<add key=”baseline-name” value=”baseline.sql” />
<add key=”post-script-prefix” value=”post” />
<add key=”post-script-always-apply” value=”true” />
<add key=”exe-file” value=”C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\SQLCMD.EXE” />
<add key=”exe-args” value=’-U %UserName% -P %Password% -S “%ServerName%” -d %DbName% -i “%SqlFile%”‘ />
<add key=”dialect” value=”NHibernate.Dialect.MsSql2000Dialect” />
<add key=”driver_class” value=”NHibernate.Driver.SqlClientDriver” />
<add key=”connection_string” value=”Server=%ServerName%;Database=%DbName%;User ID=%UserName%;Password=%Password%;Trusted_Connection=False;” />
</appSettings>
</configuration>

You can run sqlcmd.exe directly to execute t-sql scripts on SQL Azure. Here is a sample command :
sqlcmd.exe -S SERVER.ctp.database.windows.net -U USER@SERVER -P PASSWORD -d DB -i “baseline.sql”

I received these errors when I executed my SQL Server 2005 scripts on a SQL Azure database –

‘ANSI_NULLS’ is not a recognized SET option.
Deprecated feature ‘SET ANSI_PADDING OFF’ is not supported in this version of SQL Server.
Deprecated feature ‘More than two-part column name’ is not supported in this version of SQL Server.
Deprecated feature ‘Data types: text ntext or image’ is not supported in this version of SQL Server.
Deprecated feature ‘Table hint without WITH’ is not supported in this version of SQL Server.

These are not the limitations of the SQL Azure platform. SQL Azure is based on SQL Server 2008 Database Engine. The complete list of deprecated features in SQL Server 2008 are listed here along with the replacements (if any) : Deprecated Database Engine Features in SQL Server 2008 – MSDN.
After modifying the scripts to replace the deprecated features, the scripts could be executed without any further issues. All stored procedures, triggers and views were created without any errors.

The following error is a SQL Azure limitation.

‘Filegroup reference and partitioning scheme’ is not supported in this version of SQL Server.

Here is more detailed information on unsupported T-SQL – Unsupported Transact-SQL Statements (SQL Azure Database) – MSDN