You can use the Enable Database for Stretch wizard to configure a database for Stretch Database. To launch it, you need to right-click on the newly created Mila database in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), and from the right-click context menu, select Tasks | Stretch | Enable respectively. When you launch the wizard, you should get the following screen:

You can see an intro screen that describes what you can achieve with the Stretch Database feature and what you need to use them. Since your database has no tables, the second section of the wizard is Configure Azure. You are asked to enter your Azure credentials and to connect to Azure:

After signing in to Azure, you should select one of your Azure subscriptions and an appropriate Azure region. Create a new or choose an existing Azure server, as follows:

The next part of the wizard is Secure credentials. The wizard lets you create a database master key (if your database does not have one) in order to protect the database credentials and connection information stored in your SQL Server database. Database security is covered in detail in Chapter 8, Tightening Security. Here is the screen where you can create a database master key:

As already mentioned, you need to create Azure firewall rules to let your Azure SQL database communicate with your local SQL Server database. You can define a range of IP addresses with the Enable Database for Stretch wizard's page Select IP address:

And the tour is almost done. The next screen is Summary and it displays what you have already selected and entered, but it also provides an estimated price for the Stretch DB setup. The following screenshot shows the Summary screen:

As you can see, the Summary screen brings one very important piece of information to you: the estimated price for enabling the Stretch DB feature. The Estimated Pricing section in the summary report is a bit strange: it shows two prices: $61 per TB per month and $1,825 per month. If you enable Stretch DB for your database with no tables, you would need to pay at least $1,825 per month! It does not seem to be cheap at all for an empty database. However, there is also a third piece of information in that section—a link to the pricing page at Microsoft Azure—and you can find more details about pricing there. The pricing is covered later in this chapter, in the SQL Server Stretch Database pricing section. For now, it is enough to know that you don't need to pay a full month's cost if you remove your database from the cloud before that. The minimum period for payment is 1 hour.

However, this is not immediately clear, and even if you want to just try or play with the feature to find out how it works or to explore it, you need to pay for this or apply for a trial subscription (which involves giving credit card details). I expected a non-complicated trial version with limited functionalities but without required registration and payment data, where I can check and learn about the feature. Stretch DB as a new and promising feature should be easy to try. Now it is time to click on the Finish button to instruct the wizard to perform the final step in the process of enabling the Stretch DB feature. After the last wizard action is done, the stretch database is created in Azure. You can use SSMS to see that the action was successful. When you choose the database Mila, you will see a different icon near to the database name:

After the feature is enabled for your sample database, you should not expect anything, since there are no tables in it. You will create a table and continue to play with stretching later in this chapter.