I’m pretty big on the SQL Azure Serverless SKU. It allows you to scale databases up and down automatically within a band of between 0.75 and 40 vCores on Gen5 hardware. It also supports auto-pausing which can shut down the entire database during periods of inactivity. I’m provisioning a bunch of databases for a client and we’re not sure what performance tier is going to be needed. Eventually we may move to an elastic pool but initially we wanted to allocate the databases in a serverless configuration so we can ascertain a performance envelope. We wanted to allocate the resources in a terraform template but had a little trouble figuring it out.
Traditionally we’ve been using the resource azurerm_sql_database
for our databases but this provider is starting to be deprecated in favour of azurerm_mssql_database
which has better support for some of the more modern concept in SQL Azure. The documentation is pretty good for it but while there was a min_capacity
we couldn’t find an equivalent max_capacity
. Turns out you can set the max capacity using the SKU. So we had something like
resource "azurerm_mssql_database" "database" { |
This allocates a database with a capacity of between 1 and 6 vCPU that has auto pause disabled. The S in the GP_S_Gen5_6 stands for serverless and the 6 denotes the maximum capacity.