Azure Mobile Services, DB options

Question

I am trying to get to grips with Azure Mobile Services and am a little lost about which Azure services I should be using for what. When you set up a new Azure Mobile Service you only get the option to create it with Microsoft SQL Server as the database. Can you configure it to use the documentDB service instead?

Also a lot of what I read about Azure Mobile Services seem to be setup around storing data for a particular user. Is this the correct place to store data and query it for all the systems users rather than an individual or should that be handled elsewhere?

thanks Andy

Answer 1

using the .NET backend, you have a choice of using Azure SQL Database,MongoDB or Table Storage. There's no out of the box support yet for DocumentDB, but you can make it work as shown here

what you store in the storage listed above is up to you, there is no specific reason/restriction/limitation that's its only for user specific data. the samples just happen to show that.

Answer 2

You may use any backend database service. It's true you have to set up SQL when you create a new mobile service space. And the SDK has a Table provider that maps to SQL (or MongoDB). However, you can ignore all that if you want. As long as you can access the appropriate driver for your database-of-choice, you can make calls to the database from the API backend methods. This is especially true when building custom API methods.