AZURE SQL DATABASE CREATION

Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a managed cloud database for programmers/developers to develop their products easier due to less involvement in maintenance allowing the customer to concentrate on their products, because, most of the data maintenance or infrastructure is taken care by the cloud service providers.

Advantages of a cloud database:

1. Elastic in nature – increase or decrease your server capacity instantly.
2. Availability – Geo replication becomes too easier. This makes the backup strategy very easy two or three clicks.
3. Multitenant facility – Cost wise, no need to invest more money in the initial stage.

SQL Azure Creation:

Visit the Microsoft Azure Portal and signing up head on over to the portal

Visit: https://portal.azure.com

Click the SQL Database, a SQL Database blade will appear in metro style with the below list:

1. Database Name: Name of your SQL Azure database.
2. Subscription Type: Under which subscription(payment model) you are trying to access or create a database.
3. Resource Group: It’s a kind of container which will have all the resources logically group together for maintenance purpose. See, I want to give access to a specific set of resources. In that case, I can group together and provide access to that group. This makes easier for me to allocate resources to resource groups based on what makes the most sense for your organization. Azure provides an option of

1. 1. 1. Creating new resource groups
      2. Amend to the existing resource groups

The option is yours to decide.

List of key points to note under resource group.

1. resource– An easily manageable item that is available through Azure. Some of the common resources are:
   • virtual machine,
   • storage account
   • web app
   • database
   • virtual network
2. Makes our life easier, we can deploy, manage, and monitor all the resources for your solution as a group instead of handling them individually.
3. Consistency maintenance – We can repeatedly deploy solutions throughout the project lifecycle with much more confidence in our deployment which is in a consistent state.
4. We can manage our infrastructure through declarative templates rather than scripts.
5. Deployment dependencies – Clearly define the dependencies between the resources. So that, they will be deployed in the correct order.

Select Source:

1. Whether you want to create a blank database – No tables in it.
2. Want to create a sample database – you can see AdventureworkLT. All the tables will be placed in your database. This will be used to work out some samples or quick check on your SQL databases.
3. Backup – Whether this database is a backup database for already created databases (if any)

Configure server settings – This option is used to configure the server settings for your SQL Azure platform. Below are some of the points to note down in this area,

1. On selecting this option, a new blade comes right to the existing windows asking for creating a new server or you need to put it in the existing server (if any).
2. On clicking “create a new server” option, you are able to see multiple options to be provided by the user. Such as,
   • Server name
   • Server admin login
   • Password to access the server
   • Confirm password
   • Location of the server you want. (List of available data centers will be provided in the drop down. You can select the server location based on your preference)
   • An additional option is available like, allow Azure services to access server. If you want your Azure service to access, click and enable it.
   • Click select button in the below window and finalize your option.

Elastic pool – Elastic pools provide a simple and cost effective solution for managing the performance of multiple databases within a fixed budget. An elastic pool provides compute (eDTUs) and storage resources that are shared between all the databases it contains. Databases within a pool only use the resources they need, when they need them, within configurable limits. The price of a pool is based only on the amount of resources configured and is independent of the number of databases it contains.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sql-database/sql-database-service-tiers-dtu

 

The final one is collation option – Collation indicates the way, how you are going to store the data and it is bounded by a set of rules. This is really important to store a varchar or char data type or nchar or nvarchar data type. The reason is we are able to specify

1. case-sensitivity,
2. accent marks
3. kana character types and
4. character width too

Below is the overall features and details of our SQL Azure database created.