Lesson Learned #5: Deploy SQL DB V12 from ARM templates

First published on MSDN on Jul 28, 2016
When you deploy SQL Database servers using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates , if you don’t specify any version, servers will be created on V11 instead of V12.

SQL Database V12 has a long list of features beyond those of V11 and we will continue to add new features only to V12. You can check the main advantages of running on V12 in this page .

Changing ARM templates to use V12 it’s very simple, just add "version" : "12.0" to the properties as you can see in the following example:
"name": "[variables('DatabaseServerName')]",
"type": "Microsoft.Sql/servers",
"location": "[resourceGroup().location]",
"apiVersion": "2014-04-01-preview",
"dependsOn": [],
"tags": {
"department": "A"
},
"properties": {
"administratorLogin": "[parameters('DatabaseServerAdminLogin')]",
"administratorLoginPassword": "[parameters('DatabaseServerAdminLoginPassword')]",
"version": "12.0"
},