SQL Azure Primer (part 4) - Creating Logins and Users

5. Creating Logins and Users

With SQL Azure, the process of creating logins and users is mostly identical to that in SQL Server, although certain limitations apply. To create a new login, you must be connected to the master database. When you're connected, you create a login using the CREATE LOGIN command. Then, you need to create a user account in the user database and assign access rights to that account.

5.1. Creating a New Login

Connect to the master database using the administrator account (or any account with the loginmanager role granted), and run the following command:

CREATE LOGIN test WITH PASSWORD = 'T3stPwd001'

At this point, you should have a new login available called test. However, you can't log in until a user has been created. To verify that your login has been created, run the following command, for which the output is shown in Figure 11:

select * from sys.sql_logins

Figure 11. Viewing a SQL login from the master database

If you attempt to create the login account in a user database, you receive the error shown in Figure 12. The login must be created in the master database.

Figure 12. Error when creating a login in a user database

If your password isn't complex enough, you receive an error message similar to the one shown in Figure 13. Password complexity can't be turned off.

Figure 13. Error when your password isn't complex enough

5.2. Creating a New User

You can now create a user account for your test login. To do so, connect to a user database using the administrator account (you can also create a user in the master database if this login should be able to connect to it), and run the following command:

CREATE USER test FROM LOGIN test

If you attempt to create a user without first creating the login account, you receive a message similar to the one shown in Figure 14.

Figure 14. Error when creating a user without creating the login account first

6. Assigning Access Rights

So far, you've created the login account in the master database and the user account in the user database. But this user account hasn't been assigned any access rights.

To allow the test account to have unlimited access to the selected user database, you need to assign the user to the db_owner group:

EXEC sp_addrolemember 'db_owner', 'test'

At this point, you're ready to use the test account to create tables, views, stored procedures, and more.

7. Understanding Billing for SQL Azure

SQL Azure is a pay-as-you-go model, which includes a monthly fee based on the cumulative number and size of your databases available daily, and a usage fee based on actual bandwidth usage. However, as of this writing, when the consuming application of a SQL Azure database is deployed as a Windows Azure application or service, and it belongs to the same geographic region as the database, the bandwidth fee is waived.

To view your current bandwidth consumption and the databases you've provisioned from a billing standpoint, you can run the following commands:

SELECT * FROM sys.database_usage        -- databases defined
SELECT * FROM sys.bandwidth_usage       -- bandwidth

The first statement returns the number of databases available per day of a specific type: Web or Business edition. This information is used to calculate your monthly fee. The second statement shows a breakdown of hourly consumption per database.

Figure 15 shows a sample output of the statement returning bandwidth consumption. This statement returns the following information:

• time. The hour for which the bandwidth applies. In this case, you're looking at a summary between the hours of 1 AM and 2 AM on January 22, 2010.

• database_name. The database for which the summary is available.

• direction. The direction of data movement. Egress shows outbound data, and Ingress shows inbound data.

• class. External if the data was transferred from an application external to Windows Azure (from a SQL Server Management Studio application, for example). If the data was transferred from Windows Azure, this column contains Internal.

• time_period. The time window in which the data was transferred.

• quantity. The amount of data transferred, in kilobytes (KB).

Visit http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure for up-to-date pricing information.

Figure 15. Hourly bandwidth consumption