This specific day is already described by some people as GDPRmageddon based on amount of emails people receive from all companies they ever dealt with at one or another point about their policies updates and so on. I’m not going to talk about this today, instead I decided to write this tiny post on how to connect to Azure SQL from Visual Studio.
Actually short answer to this is just fire off Visual Studio and select View > SQL Server Object Explorer, the rest is just “follow the wizard” thing, and it is all documented by MSFT of course. But I’m quite well aware about widespread allergy to official documentation (no matter how good it is) and also wanted to try this my self for the very first time recently, and this is how this post came about.
QUESTION: How to connect to Azure SQL from Visual Studio?
ANSWER:
1) First things first. Assuming you don’t have Visual Studio installed on your machine, you should download and install it. There is a free version named Visual Studio Community which can be downloaded here: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/community
2) Once tiny web installer downloaded run it and click continue to kick off installation process:
Tiny installer will start fetching data from the internet before installing components on your machine:
3) Once data downloaded you can opt in for default installation which will require 597 MB of disk space:
4) Once installation is complete Visual Studio will suggest you Sign up or Sign In to use additional services, but you can avoid that by clicking “Not now, maybe later” link:
5) Of course you must select Dark theme otherwise nothing will work and click on Start Visual Studio button 🙂
Of course other themes work too but you would look suspiciously in the developers crowd 🙂
6) Once Visual Studio opened you supposed to go to View > SQL Server Object Explorer, and… And if you followed previous steps exactly/selected default Visual Studio installation configuration SQL Server Object Explorer won’t be available in View menu:
7) To address this, re-run Visual Studio installer, open Individual components tab and mark SQL Server Data Tools component – it will automatically select bunch of dependencies upping disk space requirements from 597 MB to 2,52 GB:
8) Once installation complete, re-run Visual Studio and click SQL Server Object Explorer from View menu:
9) Once it opened, right click on SQL Server node in SQL Server Object Explorer tree and select “Add SQL Server…” option:
10) It will start Connect wizard where you can specify your Azure SQL server name and credentials (yes even for Azure SQL database you are connecting through “SQL server” which is logical entity you must have to connect to Azure SQL database(s) and should not be confused with SQL Server in Azure VM 🙂 ):
11) Both SSMS and Visual Studio are smart enough to detect if your server name and credentials are good but you don’t have firewall rule created to allow connection, and if you provide your Azure credentials these applications will be able to create required firewall rule for you:
To provide credentials you supposed to click on “Add an account…” under Azure account as shown above. It will open standard Microsoft credentials prompt dialog:
After you provided valid credentials you should be able to click OK in the previous window to create firewall rule:
If you navigate to Azure portal you will be able to see your public IP added to Azure SQL server firewall rules there.
12) And with valid credentials and firewall rule in place you will be able to connect and browse through your databases and objects and execute SQL queries more or less in the same way as in SSMS:
I hope now you are clear on how to connect to Azure SQL from Visual Studio 🙂 But in case you still have any questions just leave them in comments.