Chapter 12. Moving to the Cloud with SQL Azure

Andrew Brust

In technology, things typically start out as exclusive, expensive, and complex, before eventually becoming mainstream, affordable, and simple. As computing advances, barriers to entry are lowered, and that’s good for everyone. This has happened with most technologies, including Microsoft SQL Server.

How so? Although it’s pretty easy to get SQL Server up and running these days, it wasn’t always that way. When SQL Server first came out for the Windows operating system, it ran only on Windows NT—and only on a server. The very determined could use NT Server as a workstation OS and thus have SQL Server running on their development machine. But for all intents and purposes, using SQL Server required ...

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