Looking for recommendations for basic SQL Azure database development workflow [closed]

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I am a relative beginner and will be doing database development against SQL Azure. I am confused by what seems to be a dizzying array of choices for development workflow. What I want to accomplish, in a very general sense is:

• Do development and debugging against localdb
• Deploy the changes from localdb to Azure whenever
• Repeat

With respect to making DDL and data operations it seems like I can:

• Use SQL Server Management Studio to connect directly to Azure and make changes
• Use SQL Server Object Explorer within Visual Studio to do the same
• Use a Visual Studio Database Project to make schema and other changes
• Use Azure's web interface
• Probably more

What do you recommend?

Answer 1

Personally, I use Code First Entity Framework with a datacontext that points to my local db. When I am ready to deploy my code to SQL Azure, I simply change the connection string on my datacontext and use the Update-Database command on package manager to apply all recent changes to sql azure. You could of course just simply have two instances of Sql Azure, a development instance and a production instance. But the drawback of this, is that it means you will always need an internet connection when working against your development Sql Azure instance.