Deepthi Goguri enables Azure Entra ID security on a SQL Server VM in Azure:
To enable the SQL Server 2022 on a virtual machine to use Azure AD, we need below things:
Deepthi then includes the list of requirements, starting with a managed identity and moving on to permissions and other configuration. It looks like a fair number of steps, but it’s not that onerous a task once you get to it.
And this also gives me a chance to rant about Microsoft marketing a bit, as they are in the process of switching the name Azure Active Directory to Azure Entra ID. Granted, Azure Active Directory isn’t Active Directory (although it does perform a very similar task in a fairly similar way). So to remove confusion that I don’t think really existed, they changed the name to Entra ID. Except that most of the Microsoft documentation still says Azure Active Directory, and we have about a decade’s worth of blog content talking about Azure Active Directory, so when you go searching for the resolution to a problem, you’ll have to search for Azure Entra ID as well as its former name, which means people will still link the product to Azure Active Directory—at least, until the point when there’s enough blog content and documentation in place to replace the large majority of those existing blog posts—and so you renamed a product for no reason. Plus, they picked an ambiguous name that people will pronounce multiple ways: is the “ent” in Entra like “enter the dungeon” or Entra like “a delicious entrée”?
But then again, considering how many pronunciations of Azure there are, maybe this is the plan…