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Hi Jais,

While I cannot speak for our partners, we plan to add official Azure compliance to Dynamicweb 8.3. This version is currently slated for end August.

- Jeppe

Hey Jeppe.

That sounds great - thanks!

Hi Jais

It is actually possible - we have a test site up and running. I have steps to get it into Azure, so mail me if you want to dig further into this.

But as Jeppe says, we will have official Azure support with 8.3. But always needs test pilots!

BR Nicolai

Does this mean that Dynamicweb officially supports Azure now? I couldn't find any mention of this in the release notes or documentation (installation, system requirements).

Can we deploy DW 8.3 as a website and use Azure SQL Database instead of SQL Server?

Are there any known issues or limitations that we should be aware of?

I have tried to migrate (any, even non-DW) SQL database to Azure, to no avail. The Management Studio always complains about schema poblems and that all tables need Clustered Indexes, which DW does not have.

Any clues?

You can deploy Dynamicweb to a virtual machine in Azure, which has SQL Server installed, but I don't think you can use an Azure SQL database.

SQL Server database and Azure SQL database is not the same. Azure SQL database has different requirements and it also has a lot of limitations compared to SQL Server.

Hi Morten,

Thanks for your quick response!

This is what I was afraid of. I assume using Azure Database is a no-go for DW.

Hi Jeroen,

Is this purely for testing or are you aiming at going into production with this database?

If this is for testing, download the latest Dynamicweb 8.5.1. Navigate to the "Application(8.5.1.X)\Admin\Update\Data" folder and find the file "Create_DefaultEmpty.sql". You need an empty database somewhere, like Azure, and run that script against that database. This will create all the tables and default data needed for Dynamicweb 8.5.1. There might be a few rough edges here and there, but the major issues have been fixed.

Like I said, this is NOT ready for production, which is why we haven't really featured it.

- Jeppe

Hi Jeppe,

I'm talking about our test environment.

We are currently migrating our local on-premise test environment for our customers to Azure.
Hosting the application does not seem to give errors, but we are unable to migrate any DW database from either SQL Server 2008R2 or 2012 to Azure.

The only option seems to be, if we are going to use Azure for DW, is to set up an empty Azure-ready DW database 'DefaultEmptyData' (as you mentioned) on Azure and run some sync tool to synchronize our database in SQL2008R2 to the Azure version. But I think that will not work because the schemas are quite different, or am I missing something?
 

I do not see a particularly big issue with using a sync tool of some description -- as long as you have granular control over how it syncs.

The schema for the new database is not all that different from the database you currently use. A few (actually many) tables have been removed, related to modules which have also been removed from the code base. This means that those tables could be ignored as they are legacy at this point. Or you could update them to be schema compliant if you still need those tables.

All tables have received primary keys and clustered indexes along with an IDENTITY column if it didn't have one to begin with. While an IDENTITY column is not required by cloud services (including Azure), we added them to prepare for future performance improvements. Junk data in older tables without keys will fail during sync, and depending on the way the sync tool inserts the data, you might have some issues with the IDENTITY column.

All in all, it should be possible to sync an existing Dynamicweb database to a database based on the revised schema without too much trouble.

Can it run on 64-bit in Azure?

I switched from 32-bit to 64-bit in Azure and got this from DW:
The webserver is missing ODBC driver. Please install the following driver:
AccessDatabaseEngine_x64.exe

We have migrated an Sql database to Azure Sql Database using migrating tool downloaded from codeplex. http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/releases/view/32334

At first look it seems to work but have not tested it 100%.

But if I understand you right Jeppe, is Dynamicweb not supporting Sql Azure database?

Best regards.
-Magnus
 

Hi, found this old thread when searching for Azure. Is there any updated information about this subject, what is the current status for DW 8 Azure compatibility?

Best regards

Cheng