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!
