Sometimes you only need to scale reads for your database. Such a situation occurs when you would rather serve content than modify it (for example, you have a very popular portal that is managed from a single place but is served globally). In Azure SQL, there is a possibility to scale out only a part of the service—the one responsible for managing reads for you.
Note that you need the Premium/Business Critical tier to get this feature working.
To enable read scale-out on your database, you can use the REST API:
HTTP PUT https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/{SubscriptionId}/resourceGroups/{GroupName}/providers/Microsoft.Sql/servers/{ServerName}/databases/{DatabaseName}?api-version= 2014-04-01-previewBody:{ "properties": ...
