Back again with some more notes.

Opinion and Motivation

MS SQL is a popular tool, but in has a big hurdle in cloud adoption: pricing.
The obfuscation of pricing in Azure hurts. When a client asks how much it will cost to run a MS SQL cluster; no one can answer this very well. It’s sort of like asking Azure billing support how much running Sharepoint in Azure would cost (this is an inside joke; most of the Azure billing support reps don’t know about the Office365 cloud).
When you finally get an answer, well, it’s quite expensive. You’re paying for the Azure DB or the VM running SQL 2012; you’re paying for licenses, cores, compute time, huh? Enterprise shops are not immune to budget cuts. If you’re simultaneously being asked to migrate to the cloud and cut expenses… remember this post.

Solution: Use another popular relational database: MySQL
MySQL is the famed open source database.

Problem 1: Oracle bought it. If you don’t get why that’s a problem; you’re probably an executive. Congrats.
Problem 2: The original developer left and built a better version.

New Solution: Use the less popular open source relational database: MariaDB
Never heard of it? That’s okay. This post explains it pretty well:

Okay, so, that’s why, now let’s focus on the how-to.
If you followed my last blog, you’ve got a Virtual Machine in the Azure Cloud running Ubuntu 13.10. So what we’re going to do now is:

• Install MariaDB 10.0
• Connect to it via MySQL Workbench from my local desktopn
• Create a test database
• Go back to the Azure VM and prove it worked.

Install MariaDB

Here is the official website:

Open Putty and connect to your Azure VM running Ubuntu.
Issue these commands:

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 0xcbcb082a1bb943db
sudo add-apt-repository 'deb http://download.nus.edu.sg/mirror/mariadb/repo/10.0/ubuntu saucy main'

That sets up the key and repository. Now you can install it.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mariadb-server

This takes you to the following setup screen for MariaDB:

Verify MariaDB Works & Nice To Know’s

My source for this is the documentation:

To connect on your Azure VM to your MariaDB installation:

mysql -u root -p -h localhost

Great, now let’s just take it a little further so we have something to work with.
Enter the following commands into MariaDB to create a test database and look around.

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS test;
SHOW DATABASES;

Okay, so, it’s installed, alive, and working properly.

If you want to connect remotely to your MariaDB/MySQL database, be sure to:
Create an ENDPOINT on the Azure Virtual Machine
Go to your Azure Portal, click on Virtual Machines in the left navigation, and select your test VM.
Go to the EndPoints tab in the main portion of the portal.
At the bottom center, select Add (which infers you want to add an endpoint).
Select MySQL from the Endpoint drop down and it should look like this:

In a near future post I will describe how to connect to your MariaDB via MySQLWorkBench