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!