One of the things I like best about joining in on Adam Machanic’s (b/t) TSQL Tuesday blog party is that it can force you to explore things you haven’t tried before. Well that’s exactly what Wendy Pastrick (b/t) wanted us to do. Try something new. She even gave us several weeks notice for such a big project. I of course waited until the last minute.

I’d been thinking I needed to work on Azure and SQL Database for a while now. Even better I had recently read about free credits for Azure. All you have to do is join Visual Studio Dev Essentials and go to your benefits page. A few highlights of my favorite benefits.

• A 6 month Pluralsight subscription.
• Free SQL Server Developer Edition
• And most importantly (for this post) a free $25 Azure credit each month.

So once we have activated our Azure account we can go to the Azure Portal. From there the first thing I wanted to do was check out my subscriptions. You can see I have the Developer Program Benefit and when I clicked on the subscription name it brought up some basic details and usage information.

Not good enough. I want to make sure I have my $25 and that I have a limit of $25. If you haven’t noticed I can be a bit cheap. So I click on Manage and that brings up the info I really wanted to see. My credit balance and my limit.

Now it’s time to make my first SQL Database. I hit add and put in my name and resource group. I then decided to create a sample database. AdventureworksLT [V12]. I ended up making it a pricing tier S0 which is the default and is $15 a month. Given my limited usage for testing I could probably be using the pricing tier Basic which is only $5 a month. Combining them I’ll have 3 servers free using my free $25 a month. I may go ahead and drop this database and switch to a Basic for the sample (assuming it will fit) but for now I’ll leave things the way they are.

Next it was time to set the server (a database has to have a server right?) Well I don’t have one yet so I add a new one. Put in all of the details there (name, admin id & password), create it and we are good to go. I now tell the console to pin this database to the dashboard and create it. It did take a fair amount of time for it to deploy my new database but after a few minutes I was ready to go!

Now it’s time for me to explore the rest of the portal, work on connecting to the database and start playing. Hopefully we can do some exploring together.

Filed under: Cloud, Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Database, SQLServerPedia Syndication, T-SQL Tuesday Tagged: Cloud, SQL Database, T-SQL Tuesday