Scale up on Azure (and pay less)

by Damiaan Peeters 23. April 2011 01:47

Ok, you win a contest and receive an Windows Azure and SQL Azure Extended subscription worth € 500. This package includes 750 hours of a small compute instance and even 1 Business Edition database (up to 10 GB relational database).  Not bad, right?  Many thanks of course for the Belgian Umbraco User Group and Microsoft.

Last few weeks I’ve been testing around with Azure and I am starting to get confortable with it.  Even so confortable I looked at the invoices which contained almost 30 pages for last month only.  Thirty pages, while I didn’t do many heavy things.  And this all for the total amount of € 4,61.

If you want to digg into the € 4,61 split up, you will see that there is € 1.42 for relation databases. And even € 3,19 for compute hours. While this should be included in the package (that’s what they promised me …)

image

If you want to know why:

I was using EXTRA SMALL compute instances and WEB databases instead of SMALL and BUSINESS versions.

Solution

Upgrade your database: login into http://windows.azure.com go to databases and click on the manage button.  Enter your sql credentials and UPGRADE your SQL database:

ALTER DATABASE yourdatabasename
MODIFY (EDITION =  'business', MAXSIZE=10GB)

Then change the CSDEF file and REDEPLOY your solution (this can’t be changed post-deployment)

<ServiceDefinition name="<service-name>" upgradeDomainCount="<number-of-upgrade-domains>">
  <WebRole name="<web-role-name>" vmsize="[ExtraSmall|Small|Medium|Large|ExtraLarge]" >
  or
  <WorkerRole name="<worker-role-name>" vmsize="[ExtraSmall|Small|Medium|Large|ExtraLarge]">

Strange Microsoft Access Error on ADP project (Sql Server 2005 Extended Properties)

by Damiaan Peeters 2. December 2007 23:51

Today I got a very strange error on my Microsoft Access ADP Project.

image

Microsoft Office Access can't find the object 'SELECT *, sql_variant_property(value, 'basetype') AS type FROM ::fn_litextendedproperty(N'MS_DisplayViewsOnSharePointSite', N'user', N'dbo', N'table', N'TableName', NULL, NULL)'.

To be honest, I had no idea what this meant.  Neither the explanation followed by this error.
After thinking a little while, I found the solution.

Earlier today I tried to add a database schema.  And deleted it afterwards. 

If you look at the tables changed by the database schema, and the tables which where not involved, the only difference are the Extended Properties on the tables.  The tables with extended properties will also give this error in Microsoft Access 2007.  For the record, I am using SQL Server 2005 for this project.

The solution

What you need to do: open the table properties in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio.
Then go the extended properties. 

image

 

When I deleted the MS_Filter, MS_OrderBy my problem was gone.

Who.I.am

Certified Umbraco Master, Part of Umbraco Certified partner comm-it, .Net and Azure developer, seo lover. Magician in my spare time.

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