Will Beattie's Blog

  In my last post I demonstrated how you can use MySQL with Entity Framework 4. In this post I’m going to show you how to use Amazon RDS . Amazon RDS is a Relational Database Service which is similar to SQL Azure except that it supports MySQL & Oracle is coming soon. This is the actually the first time I’ve attempted to use the service and am going to be writing this as I go.  Amazon RDS takes care of all the critical database management tasks like software updates, backups & replication. Signing Up This post assumes you already have an AWS (Amazon Web Services) account, if you don’t go to the Sign In page. As with all Amazon Web Services you have to explicitly sign up, you can do this by going to http://aws.amazon.com/rds/ and clicking the “Sign Up For Amazon RDS” button. Note: Signing up is not instant, it took about 12 hours for me to receive the confirmation email. Launching the DB Instance Log into the AWS console and go to the Amazon RDS ta...

  If you’re on the .NET Platform then MS SQL Server is usually the de-facto choice for the RDBMS. However if you’re at all cost conscience then you will realize that scaling and replication is going to cost you a fair chunk of change in licensing fees. For that reason open source RDBMSs and in particular MySQL offer a much cheaper alternative. In this post I’d like to demonstrate how you can use Entity Framework 4 with MySQL. MySQL Connector Net 6.3.6 The first thing you’ll need to do is download and install the latest version of the MySQL Connector for .NET from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/ Make sure that Visual Studio is closed when you install. Pascal Case Table Names Because we are going to generate our Entity Framework Model of an existing database we want to make sure that the entity names use pascal casing. By default MySQL on Windows forces lowercase table names. You can change this behaviour by adding lower_case_table_names=2 to your my.ini file...