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The switch '--availability-zone' doesn't work with Azure SQL Database #32984
Description
I have been looking into the possibility of 'pinning' an Azure SQL database to a specific zone and the '--availability-zone' switch for the 'az sql db create' command would appear to indicate that this is possible. However I can't get this to work. The Microsoft docs appear to suggest that the Azure SQL Database service cannot be zonal only zone redundant. If this is so, what is the function of the '--availability-zone' switch ?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/sql/db?view=azure-cli-latest#az-sql-db-create
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/reliability/availability-zones-service-support
Activity
yonzhan commentedon Mar 18, 2026
Thank you for opening this issue, we will look into it.
microsoft-github-policy-service commentedon Mar 18, 2026
Thanks for the feedback! We are routing this to the appropriate team for follow-up. cc azureSQLGitHub.
plynch66 commentedon Mar 19, 2026
I notice that the Azure Powershell cmdlet (New-AzSqlDatabase) doesn't have an equivalent of the Azure CLI '--availability-zone' switch. So, out of curiosity I asked Copilot in the Azure Portal and it said this :
"Azure SQL Database indeed doesn't allow specifying a specific availability zone with the --availability-zone switch in Azure CLI. Instead, you can enhance high availability by enabling zone redundancy, which distributes the database across multiple availability zones. "
It's looking likely that pinning an Azure SQL Database isn't possible and yet this exists :
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.azure.management.sql.models.database.availabilityzone?view=az-ps-latest