🚀 Feature Request: Provide a REST-Based Client for @azure/arm-sql (e.g., @azure-rest/arm-sql) #36801
Description
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The existing Azure SQL Management SDK (@azure/arm-sql) is significantly heavier than other ARM client libraries, both in terms of generated code size and runtime memory footprint.
This creates challenges in Node.js environments that need to interact with many Azure services, where baseline heap usage becomes large even before making any API calls.
Other ARM services (Network, Compute, AppService, ContainerService) already provide REST-based client packages (@azure-rest/...) that are explicitly designed to be lightweight. SQL Management does not currently have an equivalent REST client, which makes it an outlier and harder to optimize for memory-sensitive workloads.
Describe the solution you'd like
Add a REST client version of the SQL Management SDK, e.g.: @azure-rest/arm-sql
following the same design as existing REST packages (@azure-rest/arm-network, @azure-rest/arm-compute, etc.).
A REST-generated SQL Management client would:
- Reduce the amount of code loaded into memory
- Reduce baseline Node.js heap usage
- Improve startup/initialization times
- Provide a consistent development experience with other Azure REST clients
- Still work seamlessly with @azure/identity and modern pipeline features
Describe alternatives you've considered
-
Using the existing @azure/arm-sql package:
Works functionally, but brings large operation definitions and metadata into the process, which results in higher memory usage than desired. -
Calling the Azure SQL Management REST API manually (e.g., via fetch or Axios):
This avoids the heavy SDK, but loses:- strong typing
- convenient pagination helpers
- unified auth pipeline
- consistency with the Azure REST client ecosystem