How to manage windows azure SQL Database

You can use the full SQL Server Management Studio to do the majority of the tasks.

You can download the tool here:

www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=29062

To connect to your Azure SQL database, you need to use the fully qualified server name to connect, e.g.

yourservername.database.windows.net

Also, be aware that when you connect to an Azure SQL DB, you don’t get all the same features in the tool as you do for the on-premise SQL Server. For example, you cannot manage replication.

In some cases this is because the feature is not supported in Azure. In other cases it is just that the management tool has no UI. In this case you have to resort to learning the T-SQL. ALTER TABLE etc.

Online portal has big limitation – it’s impossible to add data into the tabes that contains Guid as column type.

I have Visual Studio 2012 and I have found that “SQL Server Object Explorer” is not so bad for managing data/schemes for Azure Databases – since it’s already installed and it’s pretty simple to run it from VS during development. I am not paranoic, but I trust Visual Studio more than other 3rd party online tools and services, so I am not afraid to set azure credentials in VS.

You can connect to your Azure database as to standalone one – just check server addr on the online portal, it should be something like “servername.database.windows.net“.