Has anyone had experience with azure Support for automatically pauses to database during inactive periods when only storage is billed and automatically resumes databases when activity returns?
If it's Azure SQL, then there isn't a way to do that short of exporting the data, de-provisioning the instance, and reversing the process: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/database-export
You can try to turn down the service tier during off hours to minimize billing at the expense of performance: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/single-database-scale
Or you can see if your workload will run on the serverless tier: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/serverless-tier-overview
There is no simple answer, and the first two will require significant scripting to get working.
I looked into the Serverless tier as well. Unfortunately, the criteria it uses for auto-pausing mean it will never pause with a Laserfiche workload because most Laserfiche applications always leave their database sessions open. Thus, you'll pay for at least the minimum 0.5 vCores 100% of the time. That said, for light workloads the auto-scaling aspect may still work out to be worthwhile over something like a 2 vCore Elastic Pool.
From the docs linked above:
Autopausing
Autopausing is triggered if all of the following conditions are true for the duration of the autopause delay:
- Number sessions = 0
- CPU = 0 for user workload running in the user pool
Devin's suggestion to script scaling up and down service tiers for business hours is a good one. In our experience the scaling operation only takes a few minutes.