Azure elastic pool: Can I create as many databases as I want? I am sitting here trying to figure out what the elastic pool in Azure gives me. I have a customer that wants a guess on pricing if they move to Azure. They have 3 databases, on a server. The server has 96 GBs of RAM and a 3.4 Ghz processor. That is all I know. The three databases are sharing these specs, and each database has it own area of expertise:


one database handles all the CMS data
the second database handles all the commerce data
the third database is a database that stores user info, etc - all data that doesn't fit the two others


I think the usage pattern is pretty diverse, so sometimes the commerce DB is using a lot of RAM and CPU, other times it is the CMS DB etc.

I don't think they fit well into a single database, because they are going to need three big databases then, and almost all of them are going to be under-utilized all the time. So I thought about elastic pools.

The description of elastic pools fits the above very well: all databases share eDTUs. Perfect! But one thing the docs don't describe is: do I pay for the elastic pool AND per database? Or do I just create databases on the fly, and all of them share, that is: the databases are free, but you pay for the eDTU?

I have read this https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sql-database/sql-database-elastic-pool - but it doesn't describe my situation.

Hope someone can give me some more info.

EDIT
They are going to update the docs: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/issues/49201#issuecomment-593579476. I created an issue for this asking for clarification.
The server has 96 GBs of RAM and a 3.4 Ghz processor


The elastic pool is mainly for smaller workloads, and multi-tenant applications.  For lift-and-shift of existing SQL Servers, you're normally better-off with Azure SQL Database Managed Instance.

Only Managed Instance (or SQL Server on an Azure VM) supports cross-database queries, SQL Server Linked Servers, Transactional Replication publication and distribution, SQL Agent, and other features an on-prem SQL Server may be using.

Managed Instance starts at 4 vCores, where Elastic Pool is available in smaller sizes, down to less than 1 vCore.