What is the CA certificate path for a SQL Azure database?

Question

I have a .NET web application which connects to a database hosted in the cloud on Microsoft's SQL Azure platform. Now I'd like to use Domo, a third-party cloud-based business intelligence service, to do some reporting on the data in the Azure database. The Domo consultant has told me that he needs a CA certificate path for the database server (in addition to other standard connection info) in order to connect to it. He has suggested that I need to get a cert and apply it to the database server. However, according to what I have read in the documentation, SQL Azure always uses SSL; it is not possible to connect to it otherwise. Given that I am already connecting to it successfully in my application (using Entity Framework 6), there must be a cert already there (Microsoft's), and therefore a certificate path. How do I find out what the certificate path is? The database server name has the form xxxxxxxxxx.database.windows.net.

Answer 1

And to take this one step further you can get the path and content of the cert by running the following command through OpenSSL.

openssl s_client -connect {yourdbname}.database.windows.net:443 -showcerts

Took me awhile to remember how to do that.

Answer 2

I was able to confirm that SQL Azure DB always uses SSL and therefore does have a cert already installed. I found the certificate path by plugging the database server name (xxxxx.database.windows.net) into the online SSL certificate verification tool at DigiCert.com (https://www.digicert.com/help/). The path was listed at the bottom.