The all new Windows Azure platform was announced yesterday by Scott Gu(CVP,Windows Azure Application Platform) and an online event was hosted here at http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/

You can watch the recorded keynote on demand here at http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/Conversations

There were lot of new features announced yesterday, and the whole event was packed with heavy and exciting demos.

You can refer the blog post written by ScottGu to get a feel of what Windows Azure is going to offer during the coming days.

Another good blog post written by Bob Kelly explains the new services and changes for the existing services can be read here

The new portal looks really cool. It’s all HTML 5 and metro style enabled. Let’s see what Paras Doshi(B/T) has to say about the portal here.

I decided to start playing with the portal to understand more about the offerings, and as always my first attention was towards SQL Database.

Windows Azure SQL Database is a relational database service offered on the Windows Azure platform.Its based on SQL Server 2012.

Here is my experience creating the first ever SQL Database on Azure –

Portal View

The interface is really neat with metro style layouts.

SQL Database Creation(Initial Steps)

There is a wizard to guide you to start creating the database, and there are two options Quick Create and Custom Create

I decided to go with Custom Create as that option will give me better control on what I am doing.

The wizard comes again with cool interface asking me to enter the Name, Edition, Max Size, Collation, Server details.

There are 2 edition selection options  WEB and BUSINESS.Web edition will allow max size of the database as 5 GB and Business edition allows max size of the database as 150 GB.

I am using the evaluation subscription, so I decided to choose the web edition with 1GB limit.

I also entered the New SQL Database Server option as this was the first time I am creating a database, and I had setup no server for this subscription.

The next option was to add a Login (Only SQL login option is available), password, confirmation and region where you want the server to be deployed.

Confirmation for SQL Database Availability

In a matter of seconds (3 or 5 !) the database was up and running on cloud.

Conclusion

The new Windows Azure platform is really powerful, flexible and friendly and over the next few days I will write more about my experience working with SQL Databases and much more.

Keep checking this space for more !

Thanks for reading.