If you do not want to go full PaaS, you can create a virtual machine with a SQL Server image already in-built. In that option, the performance of the service will rely on the performance of the VM—if you find the database running low on CPU or memory, the only thing you have to do is to scale up the machine. To create a VM in the portal, you have to search for a SQL Server running on an OS of your choice, as follows:
As you can see, there are free SQL Server licenses available and what is more, newer versions can run on Linux machines. Once you select the image you are interested in, you can click on the Create button to ...
