Moving to the Cloud for Your Database-Dependent AutoCAD Add-ins

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- I'm going to make a lot of hand gestures. I'm going to do this with my right hand and I'm going to do this with my left. I'm going to adjust my glasses and then I'm going to ask you all a question. By show of hands, how many of you have all been asked a question before? OK, great. I'm seeing some hands, and again, I have nothing here.

Now, I'm going to react to that and act like I'm telling you a personal anecdote. Something to break the tension. Something to endear myself a little bit. Something kind of embarrassing and you guys are going to make an aw sound.

- Aw.

- It's true. It really happened. And now I'm going to bring it to a broader point. I'm going to really back in. I'm going to make it intellectual. I'm going to bring it to this man right here. Now, what this man did was important, I'm sure. But I for one have no idea who he is. I simply Google imaged the word, "scientist." And now, you see, I'd like it to seem like I'm making points, building an argument, inspiring you to change your life. When in reality this is just me buying time.

Now, if you don't believe me, let's take a look at the numbers. This is a real thing that's happening right now. The number of talks that I'm giving is one. Interesting facts imparted thus far in said talk, well that's going to be a 0. My height in inches is 70.5, note the 0.5. Two times six equals 12, and then interestingly enough, six times two also equals 12. That's math. 352 is a three digit number. One, two, three, four, five, and then almost immediately following that, we get six, seven, 8, 9, 10.

Now, to add more filler here, I'm to give you a couple more numbers to consider. 18, 237, 5,601, 2.6 million, 4, 4, 24. Staggering. These are real numbers, all of them. And to follow that up, let's take a look at some graphs. Now, if you take a look at this pie chart, what you're going to see is that the majority far exceeds the minority. Everybody see that? Cool isn't it?

And let's take a look at this bar graph because it shows similarly irrelevant data. Now, I'm doing this because I'd like to make it seem like I've done my homework. If you were, say, watching this on YouTube with the sound off, you might think huh, OK, this guy knows what he's talking about. But I don't. I'm floundering, panicking, I've got nothing. I'm a total and utter phony. But you know what? I was offered a Ted Talk, and dammit, I'm going to see it through.

Now, if you take a look behind me, these are just words paired with vaguely thought provoking stock photos. I'm going to point at them like I'm making use both of my time as well as your time, but in reality, I don't know what half of the mean. And now as these continue, I'm just going to start saying gibberish. Wagawa, Gaba Gaba, turkey, mouth in a mouth, chip, trip, my dog skip. Rip it and dip it, Richard. I'm an itty bitty baby bopper and I'm hungry in my tum-tum. Brad Pitt, Uma Thurman, names, things, words, words, and more things.

And see, it feels like it might make sense, doesn't it? Like maybe, just maybe, I'm building to some sort of satisfying conclusion. I mean, I'm gesticulating as though I am. I'm pacing, I'm growing in intensity, I'm taking off my glasses, which by the way, are just frames. I wore them to look smart even though my vision is perfect.

And now I'm going to slow things down a little bit. I'm going to change the tone. I'm going to make it seem like I'm building to a moment. And what if I was. Amazing, isn't it? What can you do? Life's a roller coaster. You know, if there's one thing you take away from my talk, I'd like you to think about what you heard at the beginning, and I'd like you to think about what you hear now because it was nothing and it's still nothing. Think about that. Or don't, that's fine. And now I'm going to stop talking. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

[END PLAYBACK]

JERRY WINTERS: OK. So that is nothing. Better stop that before we keep going here. And so, now that you know what nothing is, hopefully the time we spend together, you'll leave saying you felt like you heard something. For those of you who didn't see the full thing, this was a Ted Talk about five minutes long, talking about how to look or sound smart in your Ted Talk presentations.

The whole thing was about how people sometimes do all sorts of things that make it seem like you're actually getting something, when in reality, you're not getting anything of value. So hopefully, once again, you'll feel like you actually got something during our time together.

My name is Jerry Winters. My title now is grandpa. I had my first grandchild about a week ago and we're thrilled with that. Thank you. I didn't do the work. It was the mother that did the work. She carried the baby. She birthed the baby. She did a lot of work here.

And so this is my PowerPoint presentation here. This is the title screen and I have one more. This is it. This is the PowerPoint presentation. I don't like PowerPoint because as you saw in the previous talks, sometimes PowerPoint is used as a substitution for actual content and actual discussion.

So this is it. This is all you get for the PowerPoint, but hopefully the content that we show will actually be worth your while here. This class is all about-- let me go to my PowerPoint presentation again, here. This class is all about moving to the cloud for your database dependent AutoCAD add-ins.

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, it's actually database not database. I don't know. I use both interchangeably. I hope it means the same thing. But this is about taking an application that you've written in AutoCAD, that maybe uses a database of some sort, or a database if that's what your preference is, and taking that database and moving it to the cloud.

So what is the cloud? Any thoughts on that. What is the cloud? 10 years ago I would say what is the cloud and you'd start looking up. Right? The cloud, the cloud. We pretty much know what the cloud is, right? The cloud is a bunch of computers, really. So the cloud was invented by Al Gore, just previous to inventing the internet, and he actually invented the internet so that he could implement the cloud. That's where the cloud came from. So we have him to thank for that. We're grateful for that.

So the cloud is basically a bunch of computers and these computers are placed in different data centers or data centers. And they're here, they're everywhere, all around the world and that's what makes up the cloud. And so with the cloud, data in the cloud, oftentimes, is in multiple locations. Multiple storage locations so that depending on where you are you have a closer connection to the cloud.

Is anyone here from Europe? Anyone here from Asia? Anyone here from other places? If you go to a web site-- you're from Europe? Where? Sweden, wonderful. So if you go to Sweden and you try to hit a web site here in the States, is there any speed difference for you? Do you notice that? OK, and maybe it's changing a little bit just because speeds are faster. OK. I remember the time when you wanted to get on the internet you'd hear this

[SCREECHING CRASHING SOUND]

--sound. Right? You'd hear this crazy sound because your 14 4 and 4 K modem is dialing up, right? And then we got 56K. Whoa, how fast was that? That was amazing. And now we have people who make a web page and they put a 10 gigabyte photo of themselves-- yes, I said gigabyte, not megabyte. I understand the difference. They put this photo of themselves on the home page, and today we can load it up, and it comes up relatively quickly. Whereas-- well, a five gigabyte photo might be pushing a little bit but-- so yes, so speeds are faster and better in that sense.

So in the cloud you have the same data, in some cases, put in multiple locations. OK. So let's talk about the cloud and databases and let's get to-- it's just not showing up up there. I must have closed it. Uno momento por favor. What do I want? I want [INAUDIBLE] There we go.

All right. So we're going to talk today about four primary things. First of all, the pros and cons of cloud based database storage. So what are the pros and cons of cloud based database storage? I've listed a few here. We'll talk a little bit about more things here. So the first thing I have here is inexpensive startup costs. If you want to get an instance of SQL Server going, you've got-- let's pretend that you have nothing. You're starting from scratch. OK?

You've got to start by getting a machine. Right? A server of some sort. How much is that going to cost you? $12,000. OK, you've got a better budget than I do. $12,000, that's good. OK, so we've got a $12,000 machine now, a server. Then we've got to get the actual database going. A seed or a license of SQL Server, which is going to cost you how much? $800, SQL Server.

[? So we ?] got an operating system, right? OK. But SQL server, depending on what, you're looking at $1,000, $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $10,000, $20,000, $100,000, depending on what you're getting. Licensing with SQL Server has kind of been crazy. It used to be bought a license of SQL Server and you had SQL Server, and it's not really that way anymore. OK.

Before all that, the startup costs is convincing someone you have to do it because you're getting the prices for your machine and your software, and you have to convince about 10 people that you have to do it. But before you can convince those 10 people you have to do it, you first have to go through this thing called the IT department.

Now, if any of you are from the IT department, well, this isn't a negative reflection on you. I was going to say it's not a negative reflection, but it is because those of you that are not in the IT department, you know how difficult it is to work with people like him. OK, because you want it. You see a need for it and you want it, and so you've got to convince the IT department. And what does the IT department say?

What do you say when someone tells you, hey I need this software? You say-- what was that? For what? Right. And now, we start the questions. For what? Why do you want it? Why isn't this other software good enough?

AUDIENCE: I want to try something and they've got to have a meeting to find out what our capacity is going to be using in 10 years from now. So we buy the right server now.

JERRY WINTERS: OK, right. Or with the virtual machines and that you already have the server. Right? And it's a question. OK, well, I've got cores now that you're saying you want, and I have to determine now, am I going to allow you to use these cores? Am I going to allow you to use this RAM, let alone the storage space? I've got to add storage space my virtual server? No way. That's just a crazy thing.

So that's a cost associated with using SQL Server and the benefit of the cloud is-- IT department, plug your ears-- you can bypass the IT department. OK? Yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JERRY WINTERS: What was that? Sorry, what was that?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] bringing legal into.

JERRY WINTERS: No, I'm bringing legal into it. Right. You can usually bypass the IT department because the IT department still has an iron clad grip on this thing called the firewall. Right? OK. So there is one element there that usually is not an issue.

OK, usually not an issue. But if you're a developer, and hey, I just want to try this out. You can do that because you're not dealing with now $12,000 for this, $8,000 for that, red tape, meetings, having a special session of Congress to get an instance of SQL Server just because you want to try something.

As we'll see in a minute, it's basically a matter of I've got $5, I want to try something. I'm going to withgo my coffee this morning. I'll still have my coffee in the afternoon. I'm going to withgo my coffee this morning because I want to try something. So number one, start up costs, inexpensive. Number two, globally accessible.

Some of you have talked about being in the field or having multiple offices and that. If you have an instance of SQL Server running in a machine in your office and you want to make it available to the world, what's the IT department going to say? No. Right? Are they going to say something other than no? No.

You can try to blackmail. You can hold crazy pictures over their head of things that happen at Autodesk university, and they're still going to say no because when you open up a pipeline to a local server in your system, you're opening up a lot of problems, potentially.

Now, I can appreciate that. I can understand that. I can accept that kind of a no answer. But making it globally accessible, it is, by its nature, globally accessible. Now you can close that down on the cloud as well. You can say I only want IP addresses in this range to be able to access this. So the fact that it can be globally accessible, and normally is globally accessible, does not mean it has to be globally accessible. It can be pared down a little bit. OK.

SQL server, Express to Enterprise compatible SQL and .NET code. So if you're going to move to the cloud or you want to move to the cloud, you don't have to rewrite 10 million lines of code. There's something called a connection string, and you change the connection string, and you run the program, and it works.

AUDIENCE: Even if it's not written in .NET?

JERRY WINTERS: Even if it's not written in .NET. Well, what's it written in?

AUDIENCE: VBA.

JERRY WINTERS: OK, yes, VBA, same thing. Yeah, VBA, same thing. I was going to say list-- I don't know if list could take a connection string, it might work. I've never tried that. I don't know. It works with list? OK. It's a connection string. The connection string is saying, this is the driver to use, this is the location of the database, whether it be a URL, a URN type thing, or a IP address, and then credentials, username, password, that kind of thing.

All right, number four, bragging rights. OK hey, I'm on the cloud. Check me out, I'm on the cloud. Yeah, I just have a fully replicated SQL Azure database I put on the cloud. It's accessible now to all the countries in the world. And the cool thing is with that is that you can be a-- don't raise your hand, OK, don't raise your hand. You can be a 34-year-old guy living in the basement of your parents' house and you could actually still do this. Or gal, although it's probably more prevalent with guys. OK.

It can be implemented without IT department red tape. Now, I'm not saying bypass the IT department every time, or all the time, or even ever necessarily. But the fact that you can actually implement this and get it going without having to go through a bunch of them, is nice. Multiple geolocated locations and options. So when it comes to cloud stuff, you can basically say, I want to have my server on the West Coast. I don't have my server on the East Coast. I want to have my server wherever you want to have your server.

Now, why is that important? I've got a friend slash client that is in Alaska, and in Alaska they have connectivity issues in some of the areas that they live in. We joke about 56K bandwidth, they dream about 56K bandwidth. OK. So sometimes that might be an important thing. I might be able to set one up in Sweden that I might be fine accessing from Utah, but my friend in Alaska might have a different experience.

Are there cons? The primary con to me is surrendering control. I like a box sitting there. I like to know there's a drive in that machine, be it a spinning drive or an SSD. I like knowing that it's right there. I like being able to take a thumb drive and stick it in that machine and copy my files down to create a backup like that. I like that. OK. I couldn't even tell where the machine is that this stuff is. I couldn't.

I could tell you where some are in Utah, but that's the NSA building and I don't know if they'd want us to knock on their door. But I couldn't tell you where that is. So surrendering control, to me, is one of the more difficult things. Hey, I want to backup my database. No problem. Boom, here's your backup. Hey, I want to backup my database. OK, I can get that to you, but it's going to take a little time, especially for a larger database on the cloud.

All right, and the last one here, performance. What's it going to be? I know that I can go to the Azure portal and I can create a new database. And we're going to do that today in this class, but what is it actually running on? Are there little hamsters running on a little wheel to get this thing going? Because I know that I can build a machine, and I've done this. I can build a crazy very high performance machine, and I know what I've got.

I know that if I query a database that has let's say 20 million records in it, I know that if the performance isn't the way I want it to be, I've got a machine there and I can put some more stuff in it. Right? I can get a different processor with more cores. I can get an additional processor. I can boost up the RAM. I can do things to improve performance with that particular machine, but in the cloud I don't know what it's running on. And I can probably pay more money to get a little bit better performance, but I still don't know what I'm going to deal with.

Now, I've got two cons listed here. If anyone's aware of any more cons, they probably are out there, you're welcome to bring them up. But those, to me, are the two primary cons to moving to the cloud. And for some of you that might be a deal breaker. I need to have control. I need to be able to grab onto this thing. Now, the downside of that is this.

When I go into a client's place or the software development, one of the questions they ask is security. What are we going to do about security? And that's a legitimate, valid question. Having a box that's there, and this is why I bring it up to them. Yes, we'll deal with security. Yes, we'll take care of that. Yes, your people should not be sharing usernames and passwords. That would be a good thing, to not share those things.

But I bet if I came to your office at 7:00 in the morning, I could walk in the front door, walk to their cubicle, unplug their keyboard and their mouse, unplug their monitor and walk out the door with their computer. And that's probably true in a lot of offices.

Yes, there are some that require some kind of a key code to get in and that kind of thing. That's great, but in a lot of offices-- and it's interesting because the people that are most concerned about security on the software side, are usually the ones where you could walk through the door at 7 o'clock in the morning, and walk into someone's cubicle and unplug their computer, and walk away.

Or worse, walk in their front door in the morning-- and don't try this at home, please. Do not try this at home. But walk in their office at 7 o'clock in the morning and go to their server room, undo a couple of screws and pull out a rack. OK? And yet they're paranoid about security on the software side.

So one of the benefits-- I didn't put that up there-- is the fact that there is not a box where someone could potentially do that. So alarm systems, things like that are great, but not having a physical box is also a benefit. All right. Any questions about that? Yes?

AUDIENCE: If you're storing it on the cloud, how are updates handled? If the cloud is handling all of the database updates, and what if there's a conflict? It's always current, is that correct?

JERRY WINTERS: Great question. So the question was, if it's on the cloud, how are updates handled? So if you have a physical machine, once in a while you'll see something that pops up, and based on your settings it will say either a restart was required-- right, that kind of thing can happen. Or updates are available, that kind of thing.

So when it's on the cloud, in this respect here-- OK, when we're talking about the SQL Azure platform, updates are seamless. You don't see them happen. It's just there and it's continuously running. And the uptime is one of those 99.9999% uptime kinds of things.

Now, on the cons-- let me add one more thing to the con, OK? We have these people out there-- well, you've heard of Wiki leaks, right? We have people out there that are hacking things and trying to hack things. And one of these days I imagine something may happen, or something may or will get hacked on the cloud. That's another one of those things.

If your organization is being hacked, I can pull a CAT5 cable and I'm good. I can recover from that. If the cloud is being hacked or something's going on there, with the rest of the world-- so we're in good company. But with the rest of the world, we're basically sitting there and just kind of waiting for things to resolve. So on the security side, that's one of the other issues. But updates are handled seamlessly. All we're dealing with here is data that's up there. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: So the cloud doesn't have its own backup?

JERRY WINTERS: So backups, when you use the cloud, your database is normally replicated to multiple locations so that if one machine went down, the other machine would basically instantaneously be up. So that's what the uptime is the 99.9999 type percent.

And the reason they say that is because they'll say, well, no one's perfect. Something could happen. They're not saying it happened. Or they'll say because we had an issue with this server, it went down and it took one second for this other one to be up and available. But the infrastructure was built entirely around uptime. Yes?

AUDIENCE: I think that's important or is a good question is that Microsoft 365 and all of these copied platforms, none of them backup. They replicate. So replication and backup, definitely not the same.

JERRY WINTERS: Yeah, they're not the same thing because a backup you say, I want to go back to the data as it was yesterday or the week before that. Right? Replication is replication, which means drop table users-- what does that do? It drops table users. Now this is an Autodesk conference, and Autodesk has this wonderful command called undo and the cloud hasn't got that command yet.

So Control Z, you can hit it all you want. It's not going to back out of what had just happened. So you can backup your Cloud database, and I recommend that you do it. You can back them up, but one thing to keep in mind is the fact that-- as was mentioned, thank you-- that it's replicated and so, it's not the same as backup. You can't back them up. You can get copies, basically, of that backup. And I recommend you do that. All right?

Good. Any other questions about pros and cons of cloud stuff? All right. I think you mentioned we're moving to the cloud. Is that what you said? What does that mean to you? We're moving to the cloud.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JERRY WINTERS: OK. So you had a physical server in the building, now you're moving to the cloud, which was still your storage, your file shares, that kind of thing is moving to the cloud. OK, very good. All right, and then I've got a class on Thursday about using the storage in the cloud for Azure. So if that's of interest to you, you might want to attend that class as well. And that's on Thursday. OK? All right.

Let's move on down here. Actually, just move on up here. How to create a new Microsoft Azure account from scratch. All right. So if you go on the web, the world wide web-- which one do I want here? I want this one here. And you Google create SQL Azure account. Just Google that. The top thing that comes up here is Azure SQL.

Now let me just make a quick note here. Microsoft has SQL Azure. It has its cloud database. This is not the only cloud database platform out there. Oracle has their thing. Amazon has their thing. There are different platforms that are out there. Today, we're focusing on the SQL Azure. All right?

You'll notice this little link up here. It says free account up here and it says start free here. So to create a new Azure account, basically, you just follow the links. When you create a new account, it says right now at least, you get a $200 credit. That's not going to be a gift card they send to you, by the way.

That would be cool if it was because I could just create lots of email accounts. Hey, I'm a new guy. So all you do is you create this little account. It starts the $200 credit and then from there you basically just jump into creating databases, which is going to be our next step. All right. Very, very simple. Very straightforward.

Once you log into your Azure account, you're going to see something like this. All right, if I click on the plus symbol up here, this is my account I've logged into here. All right, what do you want to have a new what? A new compute? A new networking? A new storage? Web or mobile, databases, internet of things. Sounds like a Dr. Seuss thing, doesn't it?

OK, we want a new database. I'm going to click on database. What kind of database do you want? I want a SQL database, S-Q-L. Next question. What's your database name? Now, I know it's not AU 2017, but I'm going to create an AU 2017 because I have an AU 2016 already. OK. And resource group. West US. Blank database. Do you want to use a sample? What kind of database do you want? Let's do a blank database.

Server. Where do you want this thing to be? Well, I'll stay here with this west US. Pricing. Let's take a look at pricing here. When you start a new SQL database, you want to have a SQL database, basically if you're just trying something out, then depending on what you're dealing with, this first tier here, this basic might be good enough for you. This tells us we can have up to 2 gigabytes of database. That's your database size. OK? Now how big is 2 gigabytes? It's not as big as it used to be. Right

I have an 8 megabyte flash thumb drive back in my house. I didn't bring it with me here. But 8 megabytes used to be considered pretty cool. Before that, we had a 100 megabyte zip drive. Who remembers those? Anyone remember those? OK. Before that we had-- what did we have before that? We had the 1.44 megabyte floppy drive, which is why the 100 megabyte zip drive was so monumental. Before that we had the wider, bigger 5 and 1/4. That was a real floppy drive. That's where the word floppy came from.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, sorry. Some of you are getting it. So 2 gigabytes can store a lot of stuff. And remember, this is not pictures and video we're talking about. It's just data, unless you're using blobs to store pictures and video. In which case, 2 gigabytes won't go very far, but this is just data. And you'll notice for $5 a month I can have up to 2 gigabytes of data storage. OK?

AUDIENCE: If you have a server, do you not have to purchase a server?

JERRY WINTERS: No. $5 a month. You've got a database on the cloud that you can program against and your clients can use, or your people off site can use for $5 a month.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] I thought through this you'd have to have a server to put that database on.

JERRY WINTERS: Nope. Not the case. You're buying the server with $5 a month. OK? Good question. What was that?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JERRY WINTERS: Yeah, it's running on a server. There's a machine out there. But frankly, the machine that's out there, I'm not getting my own server. There's 200 million other people that have a $5 month account here. Which goes back to one of the cons, which is performance. I have no idea what I'm going to get. But for $5 a month I can get a database on the cloud that I can now program against so my clients can use. Not bad.

They've got this thing called DTUs here. I can get 5 DTUs. If you want to impress people just DTUs, don't try to explain what it means because you won't be able to explain it because I can't explain it. Basically, it's basically a computational value that talks about how many processing computational things that you're getting with that. So if you want it--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] how ever much this grows, they're guaranteeing a certain amount of performance?

JERRY WINTERS: Right. Yeah. So if you have an option of 5 DTUs versus 100 DTUs, you might say well, 100 DTUs is better. And maybe you need that processing time. Maybe you don't need the space necessarily, but you need the processing time. So this is kind of the way it works here. Now, you'll notice here that even at $5 a month you have georeplication.

And we talked about that a little bit. It basically means that my database is going to be the data and my database is going to be in multiple locations, so that if one data center gets hit by a bomb or the power goes out, then the database is not going to go down because of that. OK? So that's $5 a month.

All right. Now you'll notice that's a basic. You've got the standard, here, S2, S3. It's all about price and what you're getting in that, generally speaking, if you look at the comparisons here, you're looking at, basically, how much storage you need. You've got up to two gigabytes and then we jump to 250 gigabytes. Big difference there. Even at the S0 level here, at $15 a month I get 250 gigabytes, which is a lot of data. It's a lot of data. All right?

I know we have a tendency to think in hard drive. You're thinking to yourself, I can get a one terabyte drive for whatever. Well, one terabytes a lot of data. Now, maybe some of you need that, but most of us don't need a terabyte of database storage here. So notice the primary difference here is the DTUs. How much processing time, processing power you're getting behind them.

AUDIENCE: Can you change the plan?

JERRY WINTERS: Yes.

AUDIENCE: So if you start out on $5 a month and it works really well, and all of a sudden everybody wants to be on it--

JERRY WINTERS: Yeah, you can change your plans. You can bump it up. Yeah, otherwise what are you dealing with? You're like OK, I started with $5 a month and I created this cool thing called Facebook, but a lot of people need it now and so what I really need is this, over here, where I'm spending $16,000 a month.

So you know Microsoft's not going to say, sorry, stick with your $5 month plan. There's your there's your terabyte database, there. There's your 4,000 DTUs. Talk about bragging rights. That would be really cool. All right. Well, let's just create a S0. I can spend $15 a month for. Yes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] I can't be sure I'm reading it right. Point in time and auditing. What are those?

JERRY WINTERS: That's a great question. The point in time-- what was that?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] your backup button.

JERRY WINTERS: Yeah. Well, point in time restore. I haven't looked at that to be honest with you. Let's see what it says here. I'm clicking. That feature must not be enabled. Great question. I'll look that up and give you a detailed description in the handout that you'll be able to download today.

OK, it sounds to me like point in time restore, you can create backups and to me, a point in time restore would mean that you could actually say, I created a backup, I want to go to that point. I haven't had to use it. It's one of those things that if you don't have to use it-- there's a spare tire in the trunk. I have no idea what it's there for. I don't know why it's there, but that's most like what it is.

Auditing, I can do that is. You'll see a page here that basically tells you things about uptime and what servers are being used for the replication, and how much is being used. That's the auditing. It's basically how much is being used. So if you create this amazing application, and you put it out there, and you're thinking it's awesome, and no one uses it, you'll know.

AUDIENCE: Point in time restore is like a VM snapshot.

JERRY WINTERS: Yes, but VM-- yes, on the data side of things. Remember, you're not getting a machine. You're just getting database storage here. Yes.

AUDIENCE: And you're paying for the storage. You don't pay based on the number of users that are connecting to?

JERRY WINTERS: That's the DTUs. So to a degree you are paying for that. So you'll notice if I come back-- I'm still here, OK. So we have $15 a month will get me 10 DTUs. Notice the only difference between S0 and S1 is the number of DTUs. Right? And that's not going to let me bring up a good description of that either.

So 10 DTUs, 20 DTUs, 50 DTUs, 100 DTUs. Pretty much, they're all the same thing except for how much is being used. And Microsoft will let you know if there's a problem. They'll let you know, hey you're kind of exceeding your stuff here. We need to bump you up to the next level plan.

AUDIENCE: Is there any calculation between the number of users compared to DTU?

JERRY WINTERS: It's not the number of users. It's the amount of bandwidth that's used to access it and what you're pulling down. Did you have a question?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] answer this. It's not based on number of users.

JERRY WINTERS: No, but the thing you want to understand is that you don't want to create-- when you have a local SQL Server database, you might find it useful to give permissions to people on your Active Directory network or whatever. When you go to the cloud, you don't want to create a new login for every single user that might be using it. You want to take care of that through your software and things like that. And we'll go through the process of creating users, and permissions, and that kind of stuff while we're here. Yes?

AUDIENCE: If you stop the subscription, your files will be deleted [INAUDIBLE]

JERRY WINTERS: Yes, if you stop the subscription, the data goes away. Now, my guess is-- I haven't tried this-- but my guess is if I stop my subscription today and I come back to them tomorrow and say oops, which anyone try that AutoCAD command, oops? Great command. OK, if I say oops, my guess is that they'll come back and they'll say yeah, we can get your data back for you. My guess is it doesn't go away instantaneously.

But if you're under investigation for handling classified information, deleting your account-- it might take more than that to get rid of the data itself. Haven't tried it though. Haven't tried it. Haven't googled it, but my guess is it's going to stick around a little bit. And the reason is because Microsoft understands-- and the same would be with other cloud operators.

They understand that when you're putting data out that, you're counting on it being there. I've had clients come back to me and say, you know 10 years ago you did something for me, and I usually have a copy of it still somewhere. So my guess is that they're not going to just dump it because the credit card was declined or because you say shut it down. Great question.

AUDIENCE: What is the understanding about the ownership of the data?

JERRY WINTERS: Ownership of the data? The understanding is that you own the data. They're hosting the data. That's the understanding. It gets back to that pro con for control though. Right? I like control. I like to have my data. I know it's my data. I know where it is. On the cloud, it's your data still. You've seen the posts that come up on Facebook? I hereby do not give Facebook permission to-- thinking that that's going to somehow mean that Facebook no longer can use their photos on that. Well, they will never claim ownership of the data, but they're hosting the data.

AUDIENCE: Do they have a responsibility to protect that data from other people?

JERRY WINTERS: Do they have a responsibility? A liability, yes. A responsibility, it's in their best interest. Yeah, it's in their best interest. There's a license agreement, I'm sure, somewhere. When you sign up for this it talked about that. I'm sure I agreed to their licensing agreement at some point in time. What did it say? Accept. That's what it said. It basically said, if you want to use SQL Azure, you click the Accept button and that's what I did.

So yeah, if you haven't signed up already and you site up, it might be interesting to read that. But obviously they understand that their company's reputation, their butt's on the line for the data that's there, which is why replication-- what does replication mean? It means it's in two places at the same time. That's what replication means. Right?

Over here they can say georeplication, and that might mean bare minimum, 2 at the same time. If I had to guess, they might say at least 2 at the same time. Or they probably have it in 10 places at the same time because the last thing they want or need is someone saying, I trusted you. I gave you my data, and what did you do with it? So great question.

All right. So create a database. Let's create a database. I'm going to get this one, right here, and I'm going to click on the Select button. And I'm going to click on Create. And you'll notice down in the lower left hand corner it said validating, validation successful. OK, now if I come up here and hit the Refresh button, we might see a database show up here that says AU 2017.

Come on database. Come on database. Refresh database. Refresh database. And this is intentional. This is to show you how long it takes for that database to be created. I wish I had a graph, or a chart, or something like that to show you something. This might be more instructive. What was that?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JERRY WINTERS: It's actually just my account. So hopefully it won't come back and say declined. If it does, I still have my one that I already created that's up there. There we go and here it is. Now, that took-- and you can go back to the video to verify this, how long that took. That took a certain amount of time, right? It took about as long as it takes to take that CD and stick it in the drive, or download the ISO or whatever, and run the installation. So that's how long it took to run them. Didn't take a lot of time.

So there's my monitoring there. This is going on. So now I have this database and it's called AU 2017. And what's my activity log look like here? Status exceeded just now. That's what just happened. OK, and go back to my overview, and let's see here. Monitoring, it's not being used. My DTU percentage is 0% right now. All right. A couple of things here that are important to understand and see, the server name is up here. You need to know the server name and we'll see why in just a minute. OK. You'll notice when I put my cursor over there, it says that I can actually click on this little thing here. Come on. I may not be able to do it. Always right-click. If you can get your mouse over there without it going away. Don't ask me why they do this. I'm almost there.

[YELLING]

Oh, I got it. I can click the copy to the clipboard. That's what that's for. OK? I'm going to click now and then forever hold my peace. All right, next thing we have here is the server version. So this will let you know what's happening with your server. And then we have show database connection strings. This is one of the more important things, right here OK, here are my connection strings. I'm using the adu.net stuff because I'm going to be developing here in vb.net I've got odbc, php, jbc as well. So different connection strings are there that I can copy as well.

So I come over here and same thing. I can come over here and copy that, but I'm not going to do that because it was so hard to copy the previous one. I don't want to lose that. All right, so I can copy that to the database. Next thing I want to talk about is tools. Click on Tools, here, and here are my tools.

You'll notice there's something here called open in Visual Studio. If I click on that, lets minimize this, I've got a few things here. Open in Visual Studio. I've got configure your firewall to make sure your machine can access the database. Now, this is the firewall of the machine that you're on. OK? This is not the IT department's firewall. All right?

We've got download Visual Studio, if you don't already have it, and SQL Server Data Tools. I'm going to click on Download SQL Server Data Tools here for a second. Some people look at my presentation or say, well, why don't you have your handouts earlier? Why don't you things? And the reason is because last night I was still working on this. Why is that? Because things change. In the cloud things change rapidly. They change quickly.

You'll notice the date of the release on here is-- where is it? Dated October 26, 2016. Is that fairly recent? Fairly recent, right? Fairly recent. Autodesk wanted to have stuff up like three months ago. Now, the reason this is important is because, especially on the cloud side of things with SQL, they're changing things all the time, and they're actually making them better. It's good change, OK? Better change stuff.

All right? It used to be if you wanted to create a table in Azure, you do it through the portal. Now you don't even use a portal. Then you had the Visual Studio tools stuff. So go to the tool section, you'll want to download the tools here for Visual Studio 2015 because once you do that, what you can do is you can come over here and you can click on this open Visual Studio button, right there. Sure. And it opens up Visual Studio for me.

Now, it used to be this was one of the better ways to access it. Using the Microsoft SQL Management Studio is much better way now to do this. OK? And so I recommend you download that. Get the latest and greatest on that which also, by the way, is very recent. So it's coming here saying, OK, I already have your server name in here. I already know we're using SQL Server authentication. Here's your username. What's your password?