Maarten Balliauw {blog}

Yesterday, I noticed on Twitter that the SQL Azure - Project “Houston” CTP 1 has been released online. For those who do not know Houston, this is a lightweight and easy to use database management tool for SQL Azure databases built in Silverlight. Translation: you can now easily manage your SQL Azure database using any browser. It’s not a replacement for SSMS, but it’s a viable, quick solution into connecting to your cloudy database.

A quick look around

After connecting to your SQL Azure database through http://manage.sqlazurelabs.com, you’ll see a quick overview of your database elements (tables, views, stored procedures) as well as a fancy, three-dimensional cube displaying your database details.

Let’s create a new table… After clicking the “New table” toolbar item on top, a simple table designer pops up:

You can now easily design a table (in a limited fashion), click the “Save” button and go enter some data:

Stored procedures? Those are also supported:

Even running stored procedures:

Conclusion

As you can probably see from the screenshots, project “Houston” is currently quite limited. Basic operations are supported, but for example dropping a table should be done using a custom, hand-crafted query instead of a simple box.

What I would love to see is that the tool gets a bit more of the basic database operations and a Windows Phone 7 port? That would allow me to quickly do some trivial SQL Azure tasks both from my browser as well as from my (future :-)) smartphone.

At RealDolmen, we had the luck of doing the first (known) project on Windows Azure in Belgium. Together with Microsoft, we had the opportunity to make the ChronoRace website robust enough to withstand large sports events like the 20km through Brussels.

ChronoRace is a Belgian company based in Malmédy, specialised in electronic timing for large sports events (around 340 per year) troughout Europe in different disciplines like jogging, cycling, sailing, … Each participant is registered through the website, can consult their results and can view a high-definition video of their arrival at the finish line. Of course, these results and videos are also used to brag to co-workers and family members, resulting in about 10 result and video views per participant. Imagine 20.000 or more participants on large events… No wonder their current 1 webserver – 1 database server setup could not handle all load.

Extra investments in hardware, WAN connection upgrades and video streaming were considered, however found too expensive to have these running for 365 days a year while on average this extra capacity would only be needed for 14 days a year. Ideal for cloud computing! Especially with an expected 30.000 participants for the 20km through Brussels... (which would mean 3 TB of data transfers for the videos on 1 day!!!)

Microsoft selected RealDolmen as a partner for this project, mainly because of the knowledge we built over the past year, since the first Azure CTP. Together with ChronoRace, we gradually moved the existing SQL Server databse to SQL Azure. After that, we started moving the video streaming to blob storage, implemented extra caching and automatic scaling.

You probably have seen the following slides in various presentations on cloud computing:

All marketing gibberish, right? Nope! We actually managed to get very close to this model using our custom autoscaling mechanism. Here are some figures we collected during the peak of the 20km through Brussels:

More information on the technical challenges we encountered can be found in my slide deck I presented at KAHOSL last week:

If you want more information on scalability and automatic scaling, feel free to come to the Belgian Community Day 2010 where I will be presenting a session on this topic.

Oh and for the record: I’m not planning on writing marketing posts. I just was so impressed by our actual autoscaling graph that I had to blog this :-)

It looks like I’m only doing sessions lately :-) Here’s another slide deck for a presentation I did on the Architect Forum last week in Belgium.

Abstract: “No, this session is not about greener IT. Learn about using the RoleEnvironment and diagnostics provided by Windows Azure. Communication between roles, logging and automatic upscaling of your application are just some of the possibilities of what you can do if you know about how the Windows Azure environment works.”

Thanks for attending!

First of all: thank you for attending the sessions Kevin Dockx and I gave at TechDays 2010 Portugal! A wonder we made it there with all the ash clouds and volcanic interference based in Iceland.

Just Another Wordpress Weblog, But More Cloudy

Abstract: “While working together with Microsoft on the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, we found that we needed an popular example application hosted on Microsoft’s Windows Azure. Wordpress was an obvious choice, but not an obvious task. Learn more about Windows Azure, the PHP SDK that we developed, SQL Azure and about the problems we faced porting an existing PHP application to Windows Azure.”

I can not disclose demo code at this time, sorry. Here’s a list of good resources to get you started though:

• Microsoft Windows Azure Interop
• Microsoft Interop Bridges
• Windows Azure 4 Eclipse
• PHP Azure SDK
• Windows Azure MySQL PHP Solution Accelerator

PHP and Silverlight

Abstract: “So you have an existing PHP application and would like to spice it up with a rich and attractive front-end. Next to Adobe Flex, you can also choose Silverlight as a solution. This session shows you around in Silverlight and shows that PHP and Silverlight can go together easily.”

Demo code: PHP and Silverlight - DevDays.zip (1.00 mb) (based on Silverlight 2, bug Kevin for a recent version :-))

Yesterday I did some talks on PHP and Windows Azure at JumpIn Camp in Zürich together with Josh Holmes. Here are the slide decks and samples we used.

Scaling Big while Sleeping Well

Josh talked on what Windows Azure is, what components are available and how you can get started with PHP and Windows Azure.

Running PHP in the Cloud

I did not do the entire deck, but showed some slides and concepts. This is mainly the same content as Josh’s session with some additions.

Windows Azure Storage & SQL Azure

This deck talks about the different storage concepts and how to use them in PHP.

Sample code

As a demo, I had ImageCloud, a web application similar to Flickr. Here’s the sample code: ImageCloud.rar (5.00 mb)

Here’s something I would like to share with you. A few months ago, our company (RealDolmen) started a new website, RealDolmenBlogs.com. This site syndicates content from employee blogs, people with lots of experience in their range of topics. These guys have lots of knowledge to share, but sometimes their blog does not have a lot of attention from, well, you. Since we would really love to share employee knowledge, RealDolmenBlogs.com was born.

The following topics are covered:

• .NET
• Application Lifecycle Management
• Architecture
• ASP.NET
• Biztalk
• PHP
• Sharepoint
• Silverlight
• Visual Studio

Make sure to subscribe to the syndicated RSS feed and have quality content delivered to your RSS reader.

The technical side

Since I do not like to do blog posts on topic that do not have a technical touch, considered that the first few lines of text of this post are pure marketing in a sense, here’s the technical bit.

RealDolmenBlogs.com is built on Windows Azure and SQL Azure. As a company we believe there is value in cloud computing, in this case we chose for cloud computing due to the fact that the setup costs for the website were very small (pay-per-use) and that we can easily scale-up the website if needed.

The software behind the site is a customized version of BlogEngine.NET. It has been extended with a syndication feature, pulling content from employee blogs with a little help of the Argotic syndication framework. Running BlogEngine.NET on Windows Azure is not that hard, especially when you are using SQL Azure as well: the only thing to modify is the connection string to your database and you are done. Well… that is if you don’t care about images and attachments. We had to do some modifications to how BlogEngine.NET handles file uploads and made sure everything is now stored safe and sound in Windows Azure blob storage.

That being said: enjoy the content that my colleagues are sharing, posts are definitely worth a read!

Just got back from London where I did a fun talk on PHP and Windows Azure yesterday evening. It was the first time I did a presentation after three beers, but I think it went allright. As promised, here's the slide deck and sample code (ImageCloud.rar (5.00 mb)).

Abstract: "This session covers the basics of Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform. Learn how you can develop and deploy a PHP application in Windows Azure, using the tools and libraries Microsoft provides. Creating a photo upload application, the different aspects of the Windows Azure platform are leveraged for creating a performant and scalable PHP application."

Thanks for joining the conference and my session! Also, Robert Castelo, your talk on Drupal and its community was interesting. Did not know the active developer base and security teams were that big.

Everybody knows the Microsoft MIX event, right? The one in Las Vegas? The one with all the fancy web-related stuff? Rings a bell? Ok, great. In the beginning of December 2009, Microsoft did an open call for speakers, which I answered with some session proposals. Who doesn’t want to go to Vegas, right?

The open call proposals have been processed (150+ sessions submitted, wow!) and a voting has started. Yes, you hear me coming: please go ahead and vote for a session I submitted. Voting ends January 15th, 2010.

Since I could not decide which color of the voting banner matched best with my blog’s theme, I decided to put them all three online:

Thanks in advance!

Maarten

PS: There's also Elijah Manor, Justin Etheredge, K. Scott Allen, and many others who submitted good looking sessions.

Finally found some time to write a short blog post on the announcements this morning at PDC 2009. Ray Ozzie started the keynote this morning, focusing on Microsoft’s “three-screen” vision for the future. There will be three screens connected to the cloud: TV, (handheld) devices and of course good old PC. This vision is driven by some key players: Windows 7, Internet Explorer, Silverlight and Windows Azure. Make sure to have a look at these four if you want to play in this future.

Some announcements were made as well:

• Microsoft Codename “Dallas”, a new approach to consuming data that is publicly available
• Microsoft Pinpoint, a marketplace for applications on Windows Azure
• Windows Server AppFabric, the on-premise extension to the Azure platform
• Windows Identity Foundation, formerly known as Geneva, has gone RTW today
• Download ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta, released today
• Download SQL Server Modeling CTP, the repository part from Oslo
• Download Microsoft Sync Framework Power Pack for SQL Azure November CTP, a cool synchronization means between local, on-premise data and data in SQL Azure. Yummy!

Had a great day yesterday, driving trough the city of Los Angeles and looking at various places in town. Conference day one was also very interesting, lots of good sessions. Currently missing a session slot though, waiting for a Channel9 interview on the Windows Azure SDK for PHP. Stay tuned!

A few days ago, the SQL Server Team announced the availability of three major CTP’s and several new upcoming projects in the SQL related family tree: SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server StreamInsight and SQL Azure. Now that last one is interesting: Microsoft will offer a 1GB or 10GB database server “in the cloud” for a good price.

Currently, SQL Azure is in CTP and will undergo some more development. Of course, I wanted to play with this, but… connecting to the thing using SQL Server management Studio is not the most intuitive and straightforward task. It’s more of a workaround. Juliën Hanssens, a colleague of mine, was going crazy for this. Being a good colleague, I poored some coffee tea in the guy and he came up with the SQL Azure manager: a community effort to quickly enable connecting to your SQL Azure database(s) and perform basic tasks.

And it does just that. Note that it is a first conceptual release. And that it is still a bit unstable. But it does the trick. At least at a bare minimum. And for the time being that is enough. Want to play with it? Check Juliën’s ClickOnce page!

Note that this thing will become open-soucre in the future, after he finds a good WF designer to do the main UI. Want to help him? Use the submit button!