Azure SQL Database naming ambiguity

Question

Our application uses an Azure SQL Database.

Apart from our local dev setup, we have two environments:

• Staging (for quality assurance and client testing), and
• Production (live)

The Staging database and Production database are stored on two separate SQL Database servers. In both servers, the databases are named the same.

Problem:

Since the server names are automatically and uniquely generated (and are a bunch of randomly generated letters), it is very difficult to distinguish between Staging and Production. Screenshot from the Azure portal below:

This also increases the possibility of pointing to the wrong database when running change scripts, queries, etc. If it was possible to alias/rename the servers, then this wouldn't be a problem, but I know that this isn't possible.

Any suggestions? What do you do in your environment?

Answer 1

Although it's a bit more administrative work, I typically recommend different Live IDs for Stage vs. Prod. That's because I normally want to have a different set of administrators for my cloud services. If you name one Live ID as PRODAppName and STGAppName, you can make yourself the co-admin on both of those live IDs, and simply use the Filter capability of the portal to only see PROD or STG when you need to know which service is which. Hopefully this makes sense.

Answer 2

If you want to have speaking database URLs you could use custom DNS Names for your SQL Azure Servers.

So you could CNAME your custom domains like this:

liveDB.mydomain.com to random2323LIVE32323.database.windows.net

stageDB.mydomain.com to random43435STAGE34.database.windows.net

But there is one caveat:

You still need the server name, because you need to login as user@random2323LIVE32323.

Anyways... if you use this scenario, the worst case can be a rejected login, if you mix the real server names.

For a detailed explanation see here