Originally published at SQL & Cloud Lab .

This post was drafted with AI assistance.

Azure SQL is easy to start and easy to overspend on. Most teams size their databases once, during migration, and never look again, so they keep paying for capacity they do not use. The good news is that the biggest savings usually come from a handful of changes that take hours, not weeks.

This checklist walks through those changes in the order I would apply them: measure first, then fix licensing and commitments, then architecture, then queries.

1. Right-size from real usage, not from the old server

The most common mistake is sizing Azure to match the on-premises server's hardware.…