Wednesday, September 08, 2010

SQL Azure Portal Database Provisioning Outage on 9/7/2010

At least some users, including me, were unable to provision SQL Azure Databases for three to four hours on Tuesday, 9/7/2010 starting at about 7:00 AM PDT. As of 9:30 AM, when I posted this article, I was unable to find an acknowledgement of the problem by Microsoft.

Update 9/8/2010, 7:30 AM PDT: Added Publish non-scheduled provisioning outages in Dashboard feeds as a suggestion to the SQL Azure Feature Voting forum.

Update 9/7/2010, 10:00 AM PDT: The SQL Azure Provisioning feature is now operable.

image1. I went to the Windows Azure Developer Portal to provision a SQL Azure database from the Windows Azure One-Month Pass I received this morning. I clicked the SQL Azure tab and the default ASP.NET Runtime Error message opened:

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2. The Windows Azure Service Dashboard doesn’t report any problems with SQL Azure Database:

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3. SQL Server 2008 R2 Management Studio had no problem connecting to my SQL Azure instances in the South Central US (San Antonio) data center:

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4. I subscribe to Dashboard RSS 2.0 feeds for Windows Azure Compute and SQL Azure Database for the North Central US and South Central US data centers. The last message from the North Central data center for SQL Azure Database was:

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and from the South Central data center:

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The preceding messages indicate that users can expect warnings about scheduled maintenance that affects server provisioning, but no such message was posted for this provisioning outage. Windows Azure Compute messages about scheduled instance provisioning interruptions are similar.

5. I’ll update this post if and when the SQL Azure Team acknowledges the problem on their blog or Twitter and when the SQL Azure Database provisioning returns to service.

The upshot: Microsoft should report in a timely manner unscheduled problems, in addition to scheduled maintenance operations, that affect provisioning in the RSS 2.0 feeds for all regions affected.


SQL Server Forum history: Azure SQL Site access thread. One user reported an outage at about 6:00 AM PDT.


Twitter history:

I sounded the all clear at about 10:00 AM:

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I (@rogerjenn) tweeted from Oakland, CA at about 9:30 and 7:30 AM PDT:

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Jose Farjado (@josefajardo) tweeted from Sydney, Australia at about 7:00 AM PDT:

Christine Anderson (@daftmama) tweeted at about 10:50 AM PDT:

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