Hey! Thanks for coming to my community theater session today at 4:05 (Don’t worry, I’m posting this ahead of time, if you’re seeing this, you haven’t missed the session) about Azure SQL DB!! I told you I’d throw a quick post up with some resources, next steps and thoughts. So here it is!

20 minutes isn’t a very long time, but I hope it was enough to cover the goal I had in mind for those of you who attended the session. Thanks again for coming and listening.

To recap, my goal for those 20 minutes was really to host an introductory session to show you “The water is fine, come on in”. In other words – I wanted to illustrate what it was, why you might go there and just quickly show you through the portal and show you how easy it is to connect to an Azure SQL DB from any tool on premises. I hope I met that goal!

Here are a Few Resources

I mentioned some of these, and some I didn’t.

• This Blog – Sign up to this blog in a feed reader/notifications/etc – or sign up for my newsletter. I don’t get spammy with the list – In fact I think I’m just now starting to think of ways to even start sharing regular and useful content – and I want it to be cloud focused – basically let’s continue the journey. Also in the coming weeks you’ll see some blog posts about Azure SQL DB and the ecosystem there. Quick tips, how-to’s, and analogues to the on-premises world.
• Data Excursion – Why consider the cloud?This is a brand new project between another Data Platform MVP (Tim Mitchell) and myself. In this we record videos with each other, interviewing professionals in the space, and we’ll be recording quick how-to’s and screen-casts for the techies. This is a YouTube channel, and we have a lot of content already recorded that we’ll be releasing over the next several weeks. Plus we are working on our next recordings. I plan on recording little 5-10 minute snippet videos here of performing various tasks related to Azure SQL DB (Migrations, automation, tuning, using the automatic indexing feature, restoring, etc – a complete library of what you can do and how you can do it).  So hit this URL and it will take you right to our community project – www.dataexcursion.com and subscribe to the youtube channel. We also will have some higher level videos for the CIOs and Directors, like this one we released today asking “Why consider the cloud?”
• Today’s Session, Only Longer – I recorded an earlier version of this talk in a GroupBy.org presentation. You can watch that video here. some stuff has changed and It will also look different when I present a version of this talk at the PASS Summit in Seattle in early November. But check it out if you wanted to see a bit more.
• Do your own demo!!! – You can go here and check it outThat’s the way I learn. Get int to the portal and give it a shot. Figure it out and make it work. Bring a DB up there, test it, connect to it. Find places that it makes sense and experiment. Microsoft gives you opportunities for some free credits up there to do just this. . Also if you have MSDN, enterprise agreements, etc you may have some credit access as well.
• PASS – The SQL Server community is a wealth of knowledge and resources. They host online training, support local user groups, host the world’s largest dedicated gathering of SQL Server professionals and they also have a Virtualization “Virtual Group” with presentations and content tailored just to the topic of virtualization.