Now with SQL Server

AppHarbor has been purring along in a very private beta for the last week and a half and we have gotten some valuable feedback. We’re now reasonably confident that the AppHarbor platform can receive, build and deploy your code.

Today we added support for SQL Server databases. You can add databases to your applications by clicking the “Add database” link on the application page. You’ll get a connection string for the database, and it’s (currently) your responsibility to configure your app to use that connection string when pushing to AppHarbor.

You can access the database from outside AppHarbor infrastructure, and connecting with SQL Server Management Studio from your local machine works fine. This makes getting data in and out of Appharbor fairly easy. Doing your own backups is also possible.

We are running Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express right now (full SQL Server will come later) so the usual size restrictions (10 GB database size/1 GB memory) apply. Note that SQL Server Full Text indexing is not enabled. Also please don’t move very large amounts on and off our servers. We haven’t implemented any limits on use yet, and we prefer not to incur massive bandwidth costs.

Want to try out our new SQL Servers, but don’t yet have an account? Sign up for an invite here, and we’ll be in touch shortly.