Two weeks ago I made available a copy of [AdventureWorks2012] on SQL Azure and published credentials so that anyone from the SQL community could connect up and experience SQL Azure, probably for the first time. One of the (somewhat) popular requests thereafter was to make the venerable Northwind database available too so I am pleased to say that as of right now, Northwind is up there too.

You will notice immediately that all of the Northwind tables (and the stored procedures and views too) have been moved into a schema called [Northwind] – this was so that they could be easily differentiated from the existing [AdventureWorks2012] objects.

I used an SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) project to publish the schema and data up to this SQL Azure database; if you are at all interested in poking around that SSDT project then I have made it available on Codeplex for your convenience under the MS-PL license – go and get it from https://northwindssdt.codeplex.com/.

Using SSDT proved particularly useful as it alerted me to some aspects of Northwind that were not compatible with SQL Azure, namely that five of the tables did not have clustered indexes:

The beauty of using SSDT is that I am alerted to these issues before I even attempt a connection to SQL Azure. Pretty cool, no? Fixing this situation was of course very easy, I simply changed the following primary keys from being nonclustered to clustered:

• [PK_Region]
• [PK_CustomerDemographics]
• [PK_EmployeeTerritories]
• [PK_Territories]
• [PK_CustomerCustomerDemo]

If you want to connect up then here are the credentials that you will need:

• Server mhknbn2kdz.database.windows.net
• Database AdventureWorks2012
• User sqlfamily
• Password sqlf@m1ly

You will need SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 2008R2 installed in order to connect or alternatively simply use this handy website: https://mhknbn2kdz.database.windows.net which provides a web interface to a SQL Azure server.

Do remember that hosting this database is not free so if you find that you are making use of it please help to keep it available by visiting Paypal and donating any amount at all to [email protected]. To make this easy you can simply hit this link and the details will be completed for you – all you have to do is login and hit the “Send” button. If you are already a PayPal member then it should take you all of about 20 seconds!

I hope this is useful to some of you folks out there. Don’t forget that we also have more data up there than in the conventional [AdventureWorks2012], read more at Big AdventureWorks2012.

@Jamiet 

AdventureWorks on Azure - Provided by the SQL Server community, for the SQL Server community!