Microsoft Azure SQL Database Reviews

What is really helpful about the Azure SQL is that when we have a problem with a query, we can trade information about what indexes we should create on tables. It's really helpful for admin and for developers.

I need something which is in one place so I can automate the Azure data factory, but it's a different tool. It's not easy and in one place, so I can't switch to the other tool and do something there, automate everything there in the on-prem infrastructure, and then have everything in the agent. I can just pick one packet and use it. However, I want to be able to click it and run it. 

We could definitely use something which can automate the work. For example, I know there are a lot of tips like what indexes you should use, or what security features you should look at with your current SQL server. The acquired performance is assured, so some more statistics about acquired performance would be really valuable for the developer and also the administrators who use it. That would be really valuable, but we also need something which automates the work in particular SQL agents. I'm disappointed that it is not in the simple plan and I have to buy a higher plan.

I didn't notice any problems with the performance of this product. It's pretty stable. Computing is working as it should, so it's really good. It's stable, and the performance is really very good. That's what I really like about Azure SQL.

It's very scalable. That's why we like cloud solutions. You just add on every time you need some more performance pages. I just change the plan and it works.

To be honest I have never had a problem that called for technical support. I never had a chance to contact support because it works without any problems. It's the same thing with clients because we work very closely with our customers. Every time they have some problems we get a call from them and can solve the problem for them.

The initial implementation is straightforward. There are a few click-throughs and you have ready to use infrastructure. It usually takes five to ten minutes. Even less.

We use a few different versions. It depends on the project. We use the S-1, 2, and 3, depending on the customer's requirements.

If we compare, for example, the cloud infrastructure and on-prem infrastructure, there are lots of good things about cloud infrastructure because we can scale the product so that every single time when we need more performance, more computing, more storage we can just reach to the higher plan, and we can use it. There is obviously cost reduction because although we still need an on-prem trader for SQL parts, it's not hard like it was in SQL brand because we also had to care about the infrastructure too. Right now, we are concentrating on the software which is good and saves us money. 

I would rate this solution nine out of ten because it offers a lot, including statistics and other things which are very hard to get from Azure. However, you have to specify what you actually would like to monitor, which is not straightforward.

We normally use it for development and other services. We have on-premises as well as cloud deployments, but it is mostly deployed on the cloud.

Its easy usage is the most valuable. 

It can have more dashboards for monitoring, which would naturally help a lot. Other than that, everything is okay.

We have been using this solution for the last ten years. 

It is definitely stable.

It is scalable because it is in Azure. We have around 50 to 60 developers who access it.

We have contacted their technical support. Sometimes, we take support from Microsoft, and sometimes, we take support from our partner.

We have been a partner of Microsoft, so we have been using Microsoft solutions.

It was easy to install. There was not much challenge with the setup.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate SQL Azure an eight out of ten.

It's a platform that we leverage for multiple uses. There isn't a specific primary use case for the solution.

The concurrency between the amount of the transactional replications and the logging needs to be improved. Also, the GUI, the specific management tool itself, needs some improvement as well.

It's not a feature, but the solution only offers a certain amount of memory and that's limiting. The scalability should be extended to more than two terabytes.  

In terms of stability, because Microsoft is the underlying technology, they are much more stable than Oracle, for example. Since 2014 they did a great job in offering stability, performance and high visibility on the solution, especially in comparison to other competitors.

Technical support has been excellent.

I didn't previously use a different solution.

The initial setup is easy.

I'm not sure what the exact price is, but it's a moderate amount. It's not too expensive.

We use the on-premises version of the solution. I would rate it nine out of ten. I would definitely recommend it to an SMB, a small or medium-sized business.

• Memory-optimized tables
• Elastic scale
• Azure portal management tools

Some customers' applications require very large tables (large number of records). Here are examples of how this solution helped them:

• Performance of memory-optimized tables in SQL Azure exceeds that of an on premise SQL Server
• Microsoft adds new features, including bug fixing, to SQL Azure every fortnight on the average.
• Performance benchmark: There is a benchmark suite that is relevant, Azure SQL Database Benchmark (ASDB). This benchmark includes metrics in plans for the three-service tiers, Basic, Standard and Premium. (In-Memory OLTP support is only available in Premium tier plans.)

The main reason for the business case of using SQL Azure for a few large tables for our customer was as follows:

• Most of the tables in the data model (DM) for the application are small enough to have required performance in a Standard Edition of an on premise SQL Server instance. Only four tables are large enough and have peaks of concurrent transactions per minute that are large enough to require in-memory OLTP support.
• We needed to compare TCO for an Enterprise on premise SQL Server instance for the entire DM (that would be mainly under-utilized) versus TCO of a Standard on-premises for most of the DM + TCO of SQL Database with in-memory OLTP support for these four tables. (TCO for this scenario includes an estimate of changes in the design of the application.)
• This TCO comparison was calculated for a period of two years. That is the time between a given version of on premise SQL Server and the next version.
• The end result was a lower TCO for the second scenario. The first scenario implies paying an Enterprise instance up-front at the start of the two year period.
• In the second scenario, the application would have two data repositories. Transactional control for the app is the reason why I mentioned the limitation of the SQL database. It only supports distributed transactions between instances of SQL Azure. That was a technical problem to solve. This was one of the main reasons for the changes in the app in the second scenario.
• We had to make some changes to the app to separate transactions and their contexts for the two repositories.
• In this case, it would be an improvement if Microsoft were to provide support of distributed transactions between SQL Azure instances. We would also like to see support for other kinds of services for Microsoft and other vendors who support standard distributed transactions.

SQL Azure only supports distributed transactions with other instances of SQL Azure. This has been an obstacle for us.

I have been using this product for almost four years.

You can deploy your solution to a SQL Azure database directly from SQL Server Management Studio (the same tool used to manage solutions for On Premises SQL Server editions), so, the transition from SQL Server On Prem deployment to SQL Azure deploy presents no issues.

There have been no issues with stability.

There have been no issues with scalability. This is a strong feature of the product.

Microsoft has very good customer service, both free and paid customer service (by free customer service I mean customer service on free cloud solutions like Outlook.com)

Microsoft has very good technical support for this service and product, as usual. Regarding SQL Azure, the amount of free online resources for developers is huge and relevant.

For some customers' applications, we switched from memory optimized tables with on premise instances to SQL Azure instances. The switch happened under the same SQL Server umbrella.

It takes some time to get accustomed to the Azure portal and to navigate through its tools and options. You can also connect directly from the SQL Server Management Studio. It is fairly easy to configure the proper parameters for connection. Once you are connected, it is transparent for any experienced SQL Server DBA or SQL developer.

Even if you are an experienced SQL Server DBA, there is some learning to do to be able to develop, deploy and manage SQL Azure solutions. At Microsoft Virtual Academy there is a set of free courses to learn all this.

You can use a free SQL Azure account to do some of the required practice while learning (bear in mind that the free account for all Azure tools, including SQL Azure, requires that you provide credit card information), but you will also need to license a SQL Azure plan for actual deployment and use of the solution: Basic plans, Standard Plans, Premium Plans.

You can choose a plan according to the amount of resources used by your solution (storage required, number of transactions, etc.), such that the hourly rate of the chosen plan is tied to the range of resources used.

The main setup cost that we have experienced is basically time required to do the training, and payment of a plan during the development and testing of the solution.

I did not evaluate anything else. I started using SQL Azure through teaching some MOC courses that included it, in early 2013. I had the chance to get to really know the product and the service.

For any potential customer who is considering migrating an app to SQL Azure, my advice is:

• Spend enough time analyzing if SQL Azure offers you a viable business case for the said app. It may or may not offer this to you!
• It is very important that you have a thorough understanding of the performance details and issues of the current app from a standpoint of the database engine. This is mainly with DMVs and DMFs, if you are using an on premise SQL Server.

• Availability and scalability
• Ability to understand the application and not necessarily the structure of your database
• Natural replication of the SaaS service provides efficient availability
• You can choose the geographical replication: Simply open a map and tag the new location of a replication
• Scale tab: You can change the plan of the service in terms of DTUs, point of restore, and auditing

We have configured this solution into a worldwide application based on Microsoft SQL with SQL Azure and with SQL Azure elastic pool.

Maybe the portal should have a more detailed and granular way to query data. You can use API for this purpose.

Azure is working on the query engine in order to give you the ability to analyze a query for performance with insight to improve the load or the time of a query.

I have used SQL Azure for one year along with the other Azure services.

I had no issues during our work.

It is very flexible. In the case of a heavy load period, you don’t see any difference in terms of performance. The advantage with a SaaS service is the normal scalability.

If you don't have Premium support, you need to wait for 24 hours to receive support.

Other databases like PostgreSQL and SQL Server were evaluated. We decided to switch because our .NET application works well with Microsoft solutions.

The configuration was straightforward.

You need to be careful about the size of your database or pool in order to fit it exactly within your budget.

We did not evaluate any other options.

The best use of this product is the combination with other SaaS services. Evaluate communication on premise if you need to.

We are using it for business intelligence and analytics.

The ease of provisioning and administration is most valuable.

It should have better profiling capabilities. Its price could also be lower.

I have been using this solution for about two years.

We haven't had any outages yet, so it is pretty stable.

It is scalable. We haven't hit any limits yet, but we're not running huge workloads.

We haven't had a need for technical support.

It is easy. I'm busy setting up another one now.

I did it myself.

I would like it to be cheaper, but comparatively, it is reasonably priced.

We considered Postgres in AWS as well as AWS Redshift and AWS Athena.

I would recommend it. We're very happy with what we have. It is very familiar because of our experience with on-premise SQL Server. If you are used to working with SQL Server, it is a natural progression.

I would rate SQL Azure an eight out of 10.

We provide managed services using SQL Azure to our end-clients. The price of services is fixed, and we manage the resources according to their needs.

The on-premise SQL Server licenses can be used since it is on Azure, so it's a significant savings for the customers.

SQL Azure's performance monitoring features need to be improved. It has a pricing calculator, but it would be great if we could get a rough estimate of the pricing based on fewer parameters, like the data size and the scale of the company. 

I started working with SQL Azure about six months ago.

I haven't had any stability issues with SQL Azure, but I've heard that there are frequent down times.

SQL Azure is perfectly scalable. 

I haven't had any complications setting up SQL Azure.

Microsoft controls the licensing for SQL Server and even for the other vendors. They don't play fair with AWS. If anyone wants to migrate to AWS RDS, Microsoft won't let anyone reuse the on-premise SQL Server licenses on AWS. You would need to repurchase those licenses. So it's cheaper to migrate to Azure instead if you already have an on-prem SQL Server license. The Azure platform itself is also much cheaper than AWS. So when you factor in the SQL Server licenses, it's as much 10 times cheaper than AWS RDS. I'm talking about the SQL Server RDS.

I rate SQL Azure eight out of 10. To anyone thinking about adopting this solution, I would recommend that they first decide what applications they need to migrate to Azure. Then you need to estimate the cost. All cloud vendors charge for incoming traffic, especially Azure, and it costs a lot. Around 500GB of data might cost a few thousand dollars.

The solution is primarily used as a database.

The solution is very easy to use. It's quite user-friendly.

The product is quite stable. The performance is great and it's reliable.

It's very good as an on-premises deployment.

We've found the solution to be scalable and easy to expand.

It would help if the solution was more secure. It's an aspect they could work on for future releases.

We've been dealing with the solution for many years now. It's been a while.

The solution is stable. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution scales well. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so with relative ease.

I've never directly dealt with technical support and therefore cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they are. Typically, if we have a problem, we just Google it and look for the answer online.

We don't install it. We just use it. It is my understanding that in Azure we don't install anything. We go on Amazon or Microsoft and make a machine. There's no installation.

You do need to pay a license fee in order to use the product. I can't speak to the exact price.

As we are planning to move to the cloud, we are looking at other options, including PostgreSQL or Microsoft SQL Server. It's my understanding that there is not a big difference between Microsoft SQL on Cloud and the Microsoft SQL Server. We still have lots of experience on Microsoft's SQL Server, and likely our company is still prepared to use Microsoft SQL on Azure, not PostgreSQL. On the other hand, a lot of ERPs nowadays on the market using PostgreSQL. So our developers in the company have experience with this product, PostgreSQL.

We use the product and we offer it to customers as well.

We are planning to move to the cloud in the future.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. Our company prefers SQL Azure. We enjoy its capabilities. I'd recommend the product.

Until now, we don't yet have full experience with it and just we just apply it in very small scenarios - just for feasibility and to take some feasibility tests. We have yet to start converging our ERP. We're checking if it's good or available and if it will fit in some scenarios.