Is it possible to restore a SQL Server Standard 2014 backup to Azure SQL?

Question

We currently have a SQL Server Standard 2014 database on one of our servers that is backed up daily to Azure Blob Storage. Those backups are working well and have restored beautifully to the original server in manual tests.

However, to ensure that our backups continue to be valid, I want to put in place some sort of automated restore testing. Due to performance/disk constraints, I'd rather not do this automated testing on our primary database server. But we can't spend the money to buy more SQL Server Standard licenses to set up another server. And we can't use SQL Server Express, because our database is too large (about 20 GB).

Given that our backups are stored in Azure, I thought the best way to test backup restoration would be to restore the backup directly into an Azure SQL database. I could do this roughly once per week, run some quick checks on the restored data, and then automatically delete the database, and pay for less than 1 hour of service/week. This would result in minimal expense. However, I'm not sure it's possible. Google searches for instructions on how to restore a SQL Server backup directly to Azure SQL haven't turned up anything so far.

If it isn't possible, my next thought is that I could just create an SQL Server VM in Azure and activate/deactivate it as needed for my automated restore tests. That'd be a bit more complicated though, so I'm saving that approach for plan B.

Answer 1

Not Directly. You can only directly import a bacpac file into SQL Azure.

What you can do is use SQL Server on an Azure VM to test your backup files.

Pretty sure you can write a script to automatically pull down the latest .bak file and restore it to the SQL Server Instance on the VM.