New DBA Tool Helps Companies Move to Azure Cloud

In conjunction with Microsoft’s launch announcement of Windows Azure at this week’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Embarcadero Technologies released an Azure-related database administration tool.

• By David Ramel
• 11/19/2009

With Microsoft soon to start offering its Windows Azure cloud computing services, vendors are wasting no time in releasing tools to help companies move to the cloud.

In conjunction with Microsoft’s launch announcement of Windows Azure at this week’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Embarcadero Technologies released an Azure-related database administration tool. The DBArtisan for SQL Azure tool lets companies easily extract existing SQL Server schema and migrate it to Microsoft’s cloud-based SQL Azure Database service, Embarcadero said in a news release.

The company is offering a free trial license for the new tool and its standard edition for SQL Server.

Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie announced in his keynote address that Windows Azure will go into production on Jan. 1, 2010. Microsoft won’t charge fees for the service during a one-month break-in period, Ozzie said.

Aimed at companies with heterogeneous DBMS setups, the Azure tool has object management and editing capabilities, along with SQL editing, Embarcadero said. Besides SQL Server, DBArtisan tools also supports several of IBM’s DB2 products, along with MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase databases.

In addition to extracting some or all of a company’s existing SQL Server schema for migration to the cloud, DBArtisan also helps developers deploy new cloud-based applications, the company said.