Question

I have two SQLSever instances, each of them have an identical schema. One is running in SQLAzure, the other is a standared SQLServer 2008 instance. I need to copy the data from the Azure database to my local instance.

Essentially I want to do this:

insert LOCAL_TABLE (col1, col2)
select col1, col2
from AZURE_TABLE

How would I do that?

Answer 1

In order to move data between SQL Servers, and if one of them is SQL Azure you have couple of options:

1. SQL Azure Data Sync
2. Using SSIS
3. Write your own code that will move data using, most probably SqlBulkCopy class.
4. If you would like to just copy all the data, you could also use SQL Azure Migration Wizard – you can omit the option for coping the schema, and let it just copy the data.

EDIT

And as, by the original answer from Matthew PK, you could link to your SQL Azure server from your on-prem Server, but this is only an option when you just want to do some ad-hoc testing. I would not use this approach in production for constantly syncing data.