Brandoo is an open source plugin for WordPress that translates MySQL to SQL Server. As performance increased on this blog, the free database provided by ClearDB wasn’t cutting it and I moved to Azure SQL using the Brandoo plugin.
I received a note from the author of the plugin saying it was no longer supported and continued to use the plugin because it was working.
As of WordPress 4.2, Brandoo finally broke altogether. The blog continued to work but the upgrade process failed and I couldn’t get access to my blog at all from an administration perspective. I couldn’t also post any new blog posts.
So over the past week, I have re-architected my blog to go back to MySQL as this seems to be the only reliable way to run WordPress. Instead of using the free MySQL database from ClearDB, I have set up a dedicated linux VM for running MySQL in Azure. This seems to work remarkably well, even with the smallest VM – MySQL is very efficient at running in a small VM footprint.