Provision an Azure SQL Database

Creating the database is the easy part. Three things go wrong: nothing can reach it, the free offer is configured with a value the CLI rejects, and the free offer runs out saying nothing.

Verified against Azure CLI 2.90.0 on 2026-09-03: every flag below was read from that CLI's own --help, and the free offer numbers from the product documentation the same day.

The shape of a working provision

Four commands, not one. A plan with fewer than four is incomplete.

# 1. resource group
az group create -n <rg> -l <region>

# 2. logical server
az sql server create -g <rg> -n <server> -l <region> \
  --admin-user <admin> --admin-password <password>