I recently delivered my very first SQL Saturday pre-con for SQL Saturday Richmond on Friday, March 29, 2019. You can read about that adventure here.
As part of the content for my pre-con, I wanted the attendees to be able to pull data from a database. But how in the world was I going to make that happen? I needed a database that would be accessible from the internet, but I didn’t have access to a server with this kind of access.
The light bulb went on and I thought, “What about an Azure SQL Database?” Could I really do that? I’ve been stuck in the on-premises world with no experience in Azure. Would I even be able to get it stood up in time? I mean really, I had less than a week to make it happen. Surely that wouldn’t be enough time.
That’s the beauty of Azure SQL Database, it’s take almost no time to spin up a database and make it accessible via the internet. In fact, it took me less than 5 minutes.
Once I had the database created in Azure I piped the data in via SSMS using the import data task, just like it was an on-premises server, whoa, how cool is that?!
So next time you need to stand up a database super quick, give Azure SQL Database a try. It’s secure by default and you can control who has access to it very easily via the Azure Resource Manager. Go ahead, give it a try.