I’ve messing around with Azure for quite a while. One of my my biggest complaints has been that the pricing often doesn’t pencil for smaller web projects, especially when that project utilizes SSL certs or a backing database.

In learning about Azure Synapse for a larger project, I stumbled across the mention of serverless Azure DB that can auto-scale and more importantly, for my small projects’ bottom lines, auto-pause. Now my projects that only use a handful of hours per month can function on-demand 24/7 without the need of having a provisioned DB that I’m getting charged for all 24/7.

One gotcha I ran into while switching from the Basic pricing tier to Serverless was that the conversion was failing for an unspecified reason. It turned out the reason was that I had Long Term Retention (LTR) setup on my server. Make sure to zero out any LTR settings you might have and retry the conversion.