Changing Azure Development Storage Databases

I'm personally not a big fan of having SQL Express installed on my machine. Not because it's not a capable database (it it), but I'd rather have the real SQL Server installed. I'm strongly of the belief that the best $50 a dev can spend is on SQL Server Developer Edition. It's has the full Enterprise edition features, but the license limits its use to a development environment only. Having this makes SQL Express a redundant set of services running, and that's my objection. As soon as I get the real SQL installed, I turn off the Express services. This has only been an issue one time.

By default, the Azure SDK uses SQL Express for development storage. It's kind of cool because you can peek into how tables and blobs work, at least as simulated in an RDBMS.

In SDK 1.0, there is a good thread describing what you need to do at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazure/thread/417a8aff-91af-4357-9b70-db3d50d2724e. I have the SDK 1.2, and all I needed to do was run the DSInit tool (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd179457.aspx), as seen below:

I install SQL as the default instance, so I just use a dot to represent the instance. Even though the default instance has a name (usually MSSQLSERVER), don't use the name, just use the dot. If your SQL instance is not the default, you'd need to put the instance name, leaving out the server address (localhost is assumed, naturally). For example, if you installed SQL at "(local)\sql2k8", you'd just use "/sqlnstance:sql2k8".

Executing dsinit will open a GUI window with the output of the reconfiguring:

Once this is done, you can turn off SQLEXPRESS and run your local Azure apps using real SQL Server.