Synchronize Azure SQL (cloud) with Azure SQL Emulator (local)?

Question

We have an Azure service (web role) that heavily depends on the database. For offline development/testing, we'd like to have the app+db run offline within the emulators. Running the webrole itself within the emulator is straightforward but doing so for the Azure SQL isn't so.

What is the simplest way to ensure that the cloud Azure SQL database and the emulator/local Azure SQL database are in sync? We can afford some level of staleness for simplicity of sync operation (meaning it's ok for the local copy to be a few hours stale versus mirroring every write as soon as it happens)

Thanks

Answer 1

Ran into the solution a while back, though I'd update it here:

Azure SQL cannot be run inside the emulators. You have to use SQL Server (Express/Standard/whatever) and modify the connection string in the web.config. Azure SQL and SQL server are close enough that it's doable most of the time. But since Azure SQL is a noticable sub-set of SQL server (feature wise), you will most likely run into some situations where that difference shows up and you have to spend many hours figuring out what the unsupported SQL statement is and what the fix it.

Azure SQL needs to have emulator and synchronization support.