Q&A: Will my favourite ORM Foo work with SQL Azure?

Posted by Eric Nelson on Geeks with Blogs See other posts from Geeks with Blogs or by Eric Nelson
Published on Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:05:29 GMT Indexed on 2010/06/07 15:12 UTC
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short answer: Quite probably, as SQL Azure is very similar to SQL Server

longer answer: Object Relational Mappers (ORMs) that work with SQL Server are likely but not guaranteed to work with SQL Azure. The differences between the RDBMS versions are small – but may cause problems, for example in tools used to create the mapping between objects and tables or in generated SQL from the ORM which expects “certain things” :-)

More specifically:

  • ADO.NET Entity Framework / LINQ to Entities can be used with SQL Azure, but the Visual Studio designer does not currently work. You will need to point the designer at a version of your database running of SQL Server to create the mapping, then change the connection details to run against SQL Azure.
  • LINQ to SQL has similar issues to ADO.NET Entity Framework above
  • NHibernate can be used against SQL Azure
  • DevExpress XPO supports SQL Azure from version 9.3
  • DataObjects.Net supports SQL Azure
  • Open Access from Telerik works “seamlessly”  - their words not mine :-)

The list above is by no means comprehensive – please leave a comment with details of other ORMs that work (or do not work) with SQL Azure.

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