Subscribing and Connect Microsoft Azure With SQL Server

In this article, I am going to demonstrate how to connect your SQL Server with Microsoft Azure Cloud Service. I will also share links and possible ways you can get an Azure subscription.

Prerequisite

You will require a Microsoft cloud - Azure's subscription. This is the most important question and it's been answered in the below note.
You will require an SSMS - SQL Server Management Studio to have a GUI to manage your Server.
A Microsoft account for having Azure subscription.

Azure Subscription

Microsoft Azure is a leading cloud service provided and managed by Microsoft itself. There are few ways to get an Azure subscription, as mentioned below.

First and of course, you can access this service by registering through Azure portal here and paying for the service by the relevant options for the service that you consume.
Further, you can also register for a trial here. This is worth INR 13,300 and is valid for 30 days over different services.
If you are a student and you can prove it to enroll in the program, check DreamSpark subscription here.
If you are a research scholar, you can also get one subscription by answering a few questions about your research work. Just check here.
Last but not least, if you are a business startup, Microsoft has a program for you, called BizSpark and you can get a subscription for 3 years. Check here

Demonstration

Once you have your Azure subscription, follow the next steps. I will complete this topic in 8 simple steps and I have added images to better guide you while working on this setup.

Step 1

Go to Azure portal portal.azure.com and login using the same Microsoft account that has Azure subscription.

Step 2

Once you login, you will have an interface like the following.

Step 3

From the left panel as you can see, you can select the service that you want to use. For this discussion, I will simply use a SQL Server Database, which means I will be required to have SQL Server. So, either way, you create Server first or create database first, and then create server along the way.

For this article, click on SQL databases.

Step 4

After clicking, you will see a new panel opening. It is called blade.

Click "Add" on left top option. You will see a new blade opening.

Fill in the relevant details in text boxes. You will realize that there is one more option for Server configuration that I am configuring along the database creation, as shown in the image.

Once you have added all the details, select this Server and create database.

Step 5

You can track this progress in notification popup. Please wait for the time it takes to create a server for you and a database on it. Once this deployment is done, you will get a notification.

Step 6

By now, we are all ready with server and database; all we need to do is to connect to SSMS. Once you click on SQL Database on left panel or refresh if it is already opened, you will find your database. Now, click on your database 'CSharpDemo' and you will find all the details in this regard.

Step 7

Now, we need to configure the firewall for this Server.

Click on Server name (right top) hyperlink. It will open a new blade.

Then, click on Firewall Setting and a new blade will open showing your client IP.

Add client IP in textbox and save it like below.

Step 8

Open your SSMS and connect with Server by adding relevant details.

Conclusion

Finally, you are connected to the cloud and you can use it for your application. You can perform CRUD using T-SQL. There is an opportunity to work with Elastic database that is the core idea in cloud computing. I will discuss about that probably in upcoming articles.

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