Dan. Vba and sql are my bread and butter.
Happy to do a half hour call with you to talk through the size of the data and the kinds of things you are doing. Power query is an option too.
No charge as long as you talk to me about data analysis as I'm hooked on learning ML but never get started.
Anyone on here , maybe Andy, able to help with configuring SQL in azure? I've got the dB running fine and connect as long as I can open the firewall to known IP addresses which is good for the use cases I've encountered so far. But if I want a public one ... I'm assuming I need an app server with a fixed IP address but I don't see how that improves security . I assume security is the reason I can't allow access from anywhere.
You can change the CIDR Block to 0.0.0.0/0 - but why would you want to do that? Why would you want a public one that's not IP locked?
If you're calling it from 'somewhere' then you only want authorised users or apps accessing a database from a known IP source (Can be a Company VPN or an Azure VPN)
Not done that much with Azure to be honest. I'm mostly AWS and GCP.
People regularly scan and try and attack AWS/GCP/Azure at every single second. They'll be scanning for open ports on every range - thousands of them and if they found an open SQL server then they'd be running password crackers on it 24/7.
Even on our secured open systems it's always interesting to see the Imperva or Cloudwatch logs. The number of declined port scans is scary
Remember that you have private (internal) IPs and Public (External) IPs.
Apps and servers in your VPC will have access to the database indirectly usually.
So you'll have an Internet Access Point which will be pointed at your public subnet - this will have stuff that you want to access from the Web/Anywhere. These will have firewalls and stuff from the Cloud provider and then you can add other stuff.
These will be able to call the private subnet where your application servers reside. These won't be publically accessible.
These in turn can then call the persistance layer where your Database servers etc. are located.
So the environments are airgapped away from your data.
You may provide access for DBAs to access the Database server directly by opening up an allowed External IP (like a company VPN or even someone's home IP) or allow them to login to a VPN in your Azure network which can access the server. You may want to consider securing it with MFA.