Question

I’d like to use BCP.exe on a Azure web(or worker) role to download data from SQL Azure. To execute BCP.exe on Azure, what kind of DLLs should i copy as well?

thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If you want to launch BCP.EXE periodically, what you can do is create a very small Launcher Program (just use which is depend on a conf file to launch BCP.EXE. You can put together these files as Startup Task to run in background so it will not affect the role execution process.

There could be another option to set scheduler to launch BCP.EXE and you can use a Startup task to configure the scheduler. This option does not require a launcher program but you need to run a configuration script in your startup task to make it happen.

About BCP.EXE: (components install location is here)

• BCP.EXE is a command link utility which is part of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Command Line Utilities package which can be download from the link above specific to your processor type.
• BCP.EXE is depend on Windows Installer 4.5 and Microsoft SQL Server Native Client which is another component available at the same download location above.

As I haven’t used BCP.EXE in Azure VM so what you really need is verify that above two installers (MSI for x64) does work on Azure VM first and if it does work for you, you can just create a startup task to download and install these files directly.