Grab Yourself Some Free Azure SQL Offerings

Its the time of year where things may winding down for the new year and we can get a bit of breathing room. With that free time you might want to try something new, let’s say some SQL Server in the cloud?

It could be a good time to start brushing up on new skills, seeing what the services have to offer, or maybe you want to start blogging!

In the spirit of the festive season I thought it was worth sharing the current offerings you might like to try:

Azure SQL Database

Azure SQL Database is a platform as a service offering to host individual SQL Server databases in Azure. This is solely the database, without the additional features you’d get with a full instance, such as the SQL Agent.

The free Azure SQL Database service provides a single database including the first 100,000 vCore seconds of compute each month, up to a database size of 32gb:

This provides the same service as the paid offerings, so is a fully managed platform including updates, patching, and backups. If you’re interested, check out the offer details here.

Azure SQL Managed Instance

An Azure SQL Managed Instance provides us with a near-feature-complete cloud equivalent for a typical SQL Server instance.

The Managed Instance offer provides us with a free general purpose instance for the first 12 months, in 4 or 8 vCore instances. The instance supports up to 100 databases, 720 vCore hours per month, and up to 64gb of storage.

The offer is more generous than the SQL Database offering above in terms of storage and compute each month, however this is only for a 12 month period. It also includes a similarly fully managed service like the Azure SQL Database service.

You can find the full details and further information on the offer page here.

Other offerings

There’s a whole suite of free or free-for-12-months services available in Azure. If you’re dealing with data you may want to also check out services such as:

• Logic Apps for automating flows across data and apps with minimal coding
• Azure Functions to execute code in response to particular events
• Data Factory for integration of various data sources and automation of ETL processes

Happy new year, and here’s to much more learning in 2025!