Administer your SQL Server in Docker

As with many things, you have to do it, to believe it.

The same goes for the Azure IoT Edge solution.

With the new IoT Edge solution, Microsoft provides a platform, both powerful and scalable. It’s based on Docker and logic is put in Docker containers.

And in many Microsoft presentations, this (almost correct) picture is used to show the capabilities:

I am already working with the IoT Edge preview quite some time and there is a ‘weak’ spot in the image.

I already marked it in red so it’s not that hard to find :-).

On several occasions, non-technical people explained the local storage as being a database to persist data from internal logic.

I understand the confusion, but this is just a ‘database’ used by the IoT Edge internals (I assume mostly the Edge Hub module) and it is not accessible by users. I know for sure it’s used for the store-and-forward pattern used to send ‘upstream’ messages to the cloud.

Once a message is routed to be sent to the cloud, it’s first stored by the EdgeHub. If the connection to the Azure IoT Hub cannot be established, the message is stored with a certain retention time (see its configuration “storeAndForwardConfiguration”: { “timeToLiveSecs”: 7200}).

So, how can we add local storage to our IoT Edge if we want to do something with custom code and databases, etc.

Well, Microsoft already has written a great piece of documentation here.

There, you can see how you create an SQL Server database both on Linux and Windows containers and you learn how to create a database and a table inside it. Finally, you access it using some Azure function.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into this.

We will look on other  (simpler) ways to work with the database.

 

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