Start and initialize the Storage Emulator For more information about these differences, see the Differences between the Storage Emulator and Azure Storage section later in this article. Some differences in functionality exist between the Storage Emulator and Azure storage services. The Storage Emulator connects to SQL Server or LocalDB using Windows authentication. See the Start and initialize the Storage Emulator section later in this article to learn more. You can choose to configure the Storage Emulator to access a local instance of SQL Server instead of the LocalDB instance. The Storage Emulator uses a local Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Express LocalDB instance to emulate Azure storage services. However, any version of OData supported by the storage service may be used to send requests to the emulator. Replacing the OData DLLs used by the Storage Emulator with other versions is unsupported, and may cause unexpected behavior. The Storage Emulator depends on specific versions of the OData libraries.
If you need to persist your data for the long term, we recommended that you store that data in an Azure storage account, rather than in the Storage Emulator. Data created in one version of the Storage Emulator is not guaranteed to be accessible when using a different version.
