I have finally decided to start blogging and Redgate have kindly given me a platform to do it.

So, what am I going to blog about?  Well pretty much anything and everything that I come across that is vaguely SQL Server related.  Hopefully a lot of Azure content while I’m getting to grips with it.  I’ve recently changed role and in the new job the entire test and production environment will be in Azure, and across multiple regions so lots to get my head round.

Our current production database environment is on Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS). The reason we went this route is because it’s for a database driven application and there is some cross database scripting and when we set it up that wasn’t possible on an Azure SQL Database.  I am now trying to remove that and go to using Azure SQL Database on Platform as a  Service (PAAS).  I have investigated all the stored procedures and found that whilst some can be decoupled using additional API calls (or so I’ve been told because I’m not a .net developer!) however some of the code I think may be difficult to actually decouple so I wanted to know if cross database scripting was actually still possible using a SQL Database just in case.  Thanks to Grant Fritcheys great post here I managed to get it  working on a test environment however for all you newbies like me, make sure that the user you use to connect to the secondary database has the right permission.  In the end I used my admin account so now I’ve got to create a user with much less permission but I’ve proved that in theory it all works.

For my next trick I’ve got to work  out how to develop this on my laptop and not have to rely on Azure, that may well be my next blog post!!!

Thanks for reading and hope to be back soon.