The Azure cloud platform is more than 200 products and cloud services designed to help you bring new solutions to life – to solve today’s challenges and create the future. Build, run and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premises and at the edge, with the tools and frameworks of your choice.

Cloud is everywhere. It has completely changed the way businesses think about IT resources and software solutions. Organizations of every type, size, and industry are using the cloud for a wide variety of use cases. Even individuals like you and me are using cloud and cloud services on a daily basis.

Azure is a cloud computing platform from Microsoft. Initially it was called Windows Azure. Later renamed to Microsoft Azure. It is an ever expanding set of services to help you build solutions to meet your business goals. It offers a wide variety of services. For example, we have

1. Virtual machines running in the cloud for you to host and run your software.

2. Storage services to store all sorts of data - relational, non-relational etc.

3. Software development and deployment services.

4. Networking and Data analysis services.

5. Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, Internet of Things etc. The list goes on.

Azure SQL Database is a relational database-as-a-service (DBaaS) in the Microsoft Cloud (Azure).

In this course, you learn how to use the Azure portal,T-SQL and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to:

• Create a database using the Azure portal*

• Set up a server-level IP firewall rule using the Azure portal

• Connect to the database with SSMS

• Create tables with SSMS

• Create database diagram with table relationships

• Bulk load data with BCP

• Query data with SSMS

A database in Azure SQL Database is created with a defined set of compute and storage resources.

The database is created within an Azure resource group and is managed using an logical SQL server.

Azure SQL Database creates an IP firewall at the server-level. This firewall prevents external applications and tools from connecting to the server and any databases on the server unless a firewall rule allows their IP through the firewall.  Azure SQL Database communicates over port 1433. If you are trying to connect to this service from within a corporate network, outbound traffic over port 1433 may not be allowed by your network's firewall. If so, you cannot connect to your database unless your administrator opens port 1433.