Connecting to SQL Azure with Telerik OpenAccess

With the official release of SQL Azure less than three weeks away, we are starting to see mainstream vendor support for SQL Azure. Telerik’s OpenAccess ORM is no exception. With the Q3 release of OpenAccess next week, OpenAccess will have full support for SQL Azure, going further than the basic support available today that I demonstrated on my blog last month. Full wizard support, forward and reverse mapping, and of course data services support via the Telerik Data Services Wizard. Let’s take a look at the basics here.

Getting Started

To get up and running and show the mapping and LINQ support, I will open Visual Studio 2008 (or 2010) and create a simple Console Application named OpenAccess.Azure.Demo. The first step is to enable the project to use OpenAccess via the Enable Project Wizard. As part of the wizard you need to specify which database you are going to connect to. OpenAccess gives you many choices besides Microsoft SQL Server, and one of the native choices is Microsoft SQL Azure. After you select SQL Azure, you will need to provide your credentials (don’t forget to put the tcp: in front of your server name.)

After you connect and finish the wizard, it is time to do some mapping.

Mapping Database Objects

To map some database objects to persistent classes, choose the Reverse Mapping wizard. This will bring up the Reverse Mapping dialog where you can select which tables, views, and stored procedures you want to map. In this case I will just select all of the defaults and map all of Northwind (remember I migrated Northwind up to SQL Azure.) Now it is time to build a simple application.

Working with SQL Azure Data

Let’s write a LINQ statement to fetch all of the customers from one country and print it out to the console window. First tings first, you have to put in a using statement for OpenAccess:

using Telerik.OpenAccess;

Next we will create our LINQ statement. The LINQ statement will work like any LINQ statement in OpenAccess, there is nothing special for SQL Azure, this LINQ statement would work against SQL Server, MySQL, or Oracle.

 1: static void Main(string[]
args)

 2: {

 3:  //data context

 4:  IObjectScope dat = ObjectScopeProvider1.GetNewObjectScope();

 5:  //LINQ Statement

 6:  var result = from c in dat.Extent<Customer>()

 7:  where c.Country
== "Germany"

 8:  select c;

 9:  //Print out the
company name

 10:  foreach (var cust in result)

 11:  {

 12:  Console.WriteLine("Company
Name: " + cust.CompanyName);

 13:  }

 14:  //keep the console window open

 15:  Console.Read();

 16: }

The LINQ statement uses the data context, or IObjectScope in line 4, has a simple LINQ statement on lines 6-8 to filter by the customers in Germany and then iterates those customers and prints them out to the console window in lines 10-13. The result is shown here:

Pretty basic application, however, you can see that Telerik OpenAccess has full support for SQL Azure. Next week I will show a more complete example.

Enjoy!