If you try to create a Azure SQL Database from a ARM template, you probably went through the docs,  encountered in the mandatory property called requestedServiceObjectiveId which is defined as “The performance level for the database”. That’s essentially the pricing tier that you choose for your DB. Now that we understand that, we can set a value for the field, but then we find out that the values for this property are GUIDs that correlate to the available performance levels. the docs shows this example: "requestedServiceObjectiveId":"26e021db-f1f9-4c98-84c6-92af8ef433d7" Those GUIDs are currently very hard to find. The upcoming Azure PowerShell 0.9.8 will include a cmdlet for that. But even so, why using GUIDs when we can use names…

A better solution

There’s an undocumented property called requestedServiceObjectiveName which allows you to use the pricing tier name like: "requestedServiceObjectiveName": "S1" As I said it’s not documented but confirmed working and makes your template a lot more easy to both write and read.