I am trying to get to grips with Azure Mobile Services and am a little lost about which Azure services I should be using for what. When you set up a new Azure Mobile Service you only get the option to create it with Microsoft SQL Server as the database. Can you configure it to use the documentDB service instead?
Also a lot of what I read about Azure Mobile Services seem to be setup around storing data for a particular user. Is this the correct place to store data and query it for all the systems users rather than an individual or should that be handled elsewhere?
thanks
Andy
using the .NET backend, you have a choice of using Azure SQL Database,MongoDB or Table Storage. There's no out of the box support yet for DocumentDB, but you can make it work as shown here
what you store in the storage listed above is up to you, there is no specific reason/restriction/limitation that's its only for user specific data. the samples just happen to show that.
You may use any backend database service. It's true you have to set up SQL when you create a new mobile service space. And the SDK has a Table provider that maps to SQL (or MongoDB). However, you can ignore all that if you want. As long as you can access the appropriate driver for your database-of-choice, you can make calls to the database from the API backend methods. This is especially true when building custom API methods.
Related
I am associating an Azure SQL DB Table to my Azure Search using an Indexer. I am setting this all up using Azure's website: https://portal.azure.com
When I try and create the Indexer in Azure Search, I get the warning about "Consider enabling integrated change tracking on your database." However, I have enabled integrated change tracking on my database and table.
I have successfully setup several tables this way, in the same database, and they're working just fine with Azure Search. However, this table has a schema other than [dbo], and the others with change tracking were [dbo]. The same SQL user is being used for all the tables, and it has been granted the change tracking permission to this table, too.
Is there a problem with the Azure website where I cannot do this via the UI? Can this be done otherwise? Is there a permission issue with my DB's schema? Something else?
Because of this warning, I have not actually created this Azure Search Index.
Any help is appreciated!
It's a limitation of Azure Search portal - it doesn't support enabling integrated change tracking for non-default schemas. The workaround is to create the indexer programmatically, using REST API or .NET SDK. For a walkthrough, see https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/search/search-howto-connecting-azure-sql-database-to-azure-search-using-indexers.
I write an application using cocos2d-x. Now I want to store some data in the Windows Azure Storage and get the data sometime, how can I do that?
As written, it's difficult to answer such a broad question. Having said that: I'll do my best to give you an objective answer describing Azure's storage options from a service perspective.
Azure Mobile Services. This lets you have a CRUD interface to storage, and is build to provide a REST-based API, which fronts storage. It defaults to SQL Database, but you can easily override this by creating your own custom API and using server-side JavaScript / Node.js to read/write to any storage system.
Azure blobs/tables/queues. This is the collective set of Azure large-scale storage, with up to 200TB per account namespace. You can access storage directly from your game, or through your own service tier - that's up to you. You need to worry about security, as you don't want to have your blobs exposed as public unless you want to. Fortunately you may use something called a Shared Access Signature to grant access to your app, while keeping these resources private to the rest of the world.
SQL Database. Azure provides database-as-a-service, largely compatible with SQL Server. As long as you have a proper connection string, it's just like having a local database.
3rd-party hosted solutions. There are companies that host data services in Azure, such as ClearDB (MySQL) and MongoLab (MongoDB).
One other option: Custom database solutions. If you're not using a built-in or 3rd-party storage service, you can always install a database server within a Virtual Machine. You're now managing the server, but this would give you ultimate choice.
I am working on a solution that uses SQL Azure. Part of the project deals with backups and using the DAC Web Services for backups.
The issue is that there is a different endpoint depending on which region the Azure SQL database is in. As I am working with multiple groups, and cannot ensure which region the database will be in, I am looking for a way to programmatically determine the region.
The region is also important, as I want to copy the backups to a different region just to be on the safe side.
I know that I can look in the Admin console, but I would like to use code to solve this problem.
Additional information:
The application is running on Azure using Worker Roles for functionality.
I do not have access to all of the account-id's to use the full REST API.
I do have access to the master database on the Azure Sql Server.
Working on this in C# (I failed to put the language)
You can use Get Servers request (GET https://management.database.windows.net:8443/<subscription-id>/servers) of Azure REST API to enumerate SQL servers which gives the Location or Region more info at msdn -> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg715269.aspx
I have a Windows Store app that uses Azure Mobile Services backend. I want to be able to do some analysis on the data in my database tables for which I need to import that data into Excel. How do I do that?
You have a couple of options. First, the data in the Azure Mobile Services is stored in a "regular" SQL Azure database. So you can connect to it using a tool such as SQL Server Management Studio, and export the data.
Another option would be to save the data locally using the Command-Line Interface (CLI). This document on MSDN talks about using the CLI for administration of mobile services. The CLI also has options to read data from tables, so you can use that as well - but the result will not be on an Excel-compatible format. it supports both a text-based format and JSON; you'll likely want the JSON option which is easier to parse and create some Excel-friendly format such as CSV.
You can find a walk through of using Excel to access your Mobile Services data here: http://thejoyofcode.com/Using_excel_to_access_your_Mobile_Services_data.aspx
I'm developing a .NET app, which needs to run both on Azure and on regular Windows Servers(2003). It needs to store a few GB of data and SQL Azure is too expensive for me, so I'll use Azure tables in the cloud version. Can you recommend a storage solution, which will run on standalone servers and have an API and behavior similar to Azure tables? From what I've seen Server AppFabric does not include Tables.
If you think what Windows Azure Table Storage is, it is a Key-Value pair based non-relational databse which is accessible through REST API. Please download this document about Windows Azure and NoSQL database details.
If I were in your situation, my approach would have been to find something similar to Azure Table Storage which I can access over REST and have similar accessibility API. So if you try to find the similar database to run on a machine you really need to look for:
Key Value Pair DB
Support for basic operations i.e add, delete, insert, modify an entity
Partition Key and Row Key based Accessibility
RESTful Interface to connect
If you would want to try something you sure can look at:
DBreeze (C# based Key Value Pair NoSQL DB) I just saw it and looks exciting
Googles LevelDB (Key Value Pair DB, open source and available on Windows) I have no idea about API
Redis (Great Key-Value Pair DB but not sure for Windows compatibility and API)
Here is a list of key/value databases without additional indexing facilities are:
Berkeley DB
HBase
MemcacheDB
Redis
SimpleDB
Tokyo Cabinet/Tyrant
Voldemort
Riak
If none works, you sure can get any of open source DB and modify to work for your requirement and then make that available to others as your contribution to community.
ADDED
Now you can use Windows Azure Virtual Machine to run any kind of Key-Value pair DB on Linux or Windows Machine and connection with your application.
I'm not sure which storage solution to recommend, but just about any database solution would work provided that you write an Interface to abstract all your data storage code. Then write implementations of that interface for Azure Table storage and whatever other database you want to use on the non-cloud server
You should be doing that anyway so that your code isn't tightly coupled with Azure Table Storage APIs.
If you combine coding against that Interface with an IoC container, then a single line of code or a single configuration setting would enable you to switch between data implementations based on which platform the code is running on.