Last week, Matt Cooper was able to get the Sitefinity 4.0 BETA running in the cloud (using Azure & SQL Azure). Matt was kind enough to share a lot of feedback in the forums about how this was accomplished. He has now assembled these experiences into a blog post and a video.
[ Be sure to read the full blog post on Matt’s blog. ]
How was it done?
One of the first things Matt wanted to determine is whether Sitefinity 4.0’s database schema was compatible with SQL Azure:
So the first task was to see if the database can be easily moved to SQL Azure
As Matt describes, SQL Azure is still SQL, but some features are missing:
Although SQL Azure is essentially a high availability 2008 SQL instance, because of the architecture of the system some features on standard 2008 are not available. For example, different file-groups are not supported, as you have no say in where Azure is storing your data this is an irrelevant feature, it's all taken care of.
Thankfully, by using the SQL Azure migration wizard, this task is relatively painless:
I was really impressed that even in the Beta the team at Sitefinity have made the DB 100% compliant with the current Azure SQL feature set.
Matt’s blog post contains the full details.
Thanks Matt for giving this a try and taking the time to share your experiences with others!
