Dr L I hd to run some searches on what you mentioned and thanks to BACPAC I came up with this:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh335292.aspx How to: Import and Export a Database (Windows Azure SQL Database) Which says: *If you want to import an on-premise SQL Server database to Windows Azure SQL Database, first export your on-premise database to a BACPAC file, and then upload the BACPAC file to your Blob storage container.* I have never seen the acronym BACPAC before and I can't find any option or utility to make one (I did find a DACPAC export in Management Studio, but nothing about BACPAC!). This dramatically different way of bulk creating an Azure DB confirms my suspicion that just inserting rows like a local database is not appropriate. The latency problem you mention is bigger than I would have imagined. Greg K
