As of yesterday morning, I'm unable to connect to one of my Azure SQL dbs.  I get the error:

"Timeout expired.  The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding."

when attempting to access that db from the management portal.  I'm able to login to all my other dbs on the same account.  I get the same error when attempting to access this db using SQL 2008 R2 mgmt studio.  Again, I can access all my other dbs on the account just fine.

Prior to yesterday morning, it was working fine.  I've been troubleshooting for over a day now and I'm at my wits end.  Has anybody had this issue before and can point me to a solution?

Hi Rick,

Are you by chance in the East US?  We encountered something similar this past weekend with an instance seemingly becoming quite unresponsive and I've noted at least one other person reporting issues.

Our only solution was to fail over to a Sync'd backup we had in another datacenter unfortunately as we were completely unable to determine the cause of the issues.

Denis

Hi Denis,

No, our services and dbs are in the North Central US region.  The day after submitting this question, the DB mysteriously started accepting connections again.  It seems to be working fine now.  I still don't know what caused it. 

I had a similar issue do the following

1) go to your azure management portal and from in the portal click the db link and then click manage,

For me the issue was that for some reason my Azure stopped recognizing my ip address (the machine that was using to login to azure db), so i had to add the ip address again to the safe list (when you try to login to db using management portal from the machine where its reporting issues, it will prompt you to confirm if you want to add the ip address to safe list, click yes and life will be back to normal)

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Please mark as answered if it helped

Hi Rick,

Interesting.  I have seen cases where we've been unable to write to the database or had a full outage where it is clearly on the Azure/Hardware side and not related to our application (we've identified numerous related to our application architecture as well).

If you happen to encounter an error code next time around, there is some decent documentation on how to interpret them which can be helpful.

http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2011/05/29/sql-azure-sql-azure-throttling-and-decoding-reason-codes/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ff394106.aspx

We've encountered issues where the database was unwriteable for a number of hours, was fully out, was sporadically out, etc.  From what I've found despite the promise of SQL Azure and the cloud being a managed service, you still have to undertake maintenance and business continuity strategies as you certainly can encounter outages.

Can you business sustain similar outages in the future or do you have a failover strategy in place if not?  

Denis