Microsoft Azure SQL Database Reviews

Our customers in the bank sectors use the solution for their websites. Our private customers use the solution to customize their applications on the cloud because they do not want to buy separate hardware. Some of our customers also have their on-premise SAP hosted on Azure.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that our customers do not have to manage the solution. Partners manage and optimize the solutions for the customers. 

The solution is also better cost-wise because if we host on hardware, we will have to change the hardware after four or five years. Also, if there is an issue with the hardware, the responsibility falls on the IT department. Customers do not like these responsibilities. With SQL Azure, everything is safe and secure. The clients pay a subscription fee and have fewer responsibilities.

Azure does not provide features like RDS for Oracle that AWS offers. The solution has to scale up its expertise for hosting Oracle.

My organization has been a partner with Microsoft since 2008.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. Almost ten to twelve of our customers are using the solution.

The support is good. We go to Microsoft for every escalation.

The initial setup is pretty easy. Our team is interested in working for Azure and other Microsoft products. We don't require much support from Microsoft for setup.

The deployment doesn't take much time. We only have to check for our client’s requirements. We can provide the services to the client within 15 to 20 days.

Our technical team manages the deployment. The team checks all Microsoft policies before discussing them with the customer. We draw up a proposal and then present it to our customers. We explain to our customers how their data will be added to Azure.

We may need two or three people to deploy the solution. Depending on the environment, the deployment takes one or two months or even 15 days. Once the deployment is done, the solution can be managed through a partner portal. We might also need two or three people from the customer’s organization to refresh or optimize the solution.

The price could be slightly cheaper. Our customers pay for licenses annually.

AWS secured much business in Pakistan because of RDS for Oracle. There is not much difference between AWS and Azure’s prices. AWS and Azure differ in price by a few dollars. Technically both solutions have different capabilities. AWS has a far better capability. People prefer AD authentication by AWS over Azure. We have Microsoft-certified trainers in Pakistan.

We have been asking our customers to choose Azure because they will get a lot of benefits by adopting a cloud solution. Since hardware is not easily available within Pakistan due to dollar disparity, a lot of people are choosing Azure. 

We have been pushing Azure very aggressively for the past four to five years. People continue to implement the solution despite policy challenges. One of our customers wants to host nine to ten applications on Azure. There is a lot of demand for AWS and Azure. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We decided to implement some forms for different purposes. We needed to implement it on-premises, so we did this on Azure to support the data from the forms implemented on a SQL server, and on Azure on several databases. It's very easy. 

The solution is quite straightforward to set up.

It can scale. 

The solution is stable and reliable. 

I want the pricing to be improved. They should try to lower it for their customers. 

I've used the solution for one year.

The stability is good. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution can scale. I can't say how much as I don't have a comparable use case on the cloud and on-premises. 

We have about five people using the solution right now. For now, we do not have plans to increase usage.

The support is good. They have a good document library. If there is a problem, we can figure it out. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not complex at all. For us, it did not take more than one or two hours. It was quick to deploy. 

We only need one person on hand for deployment and maintenance. They are a developer. 

We did not use a consultant for the implementation process. We have a lot of experience in Azure and a lot of systems in Azure as well. 

We have a yearly licensing fee we need to pay. It's not a cheap solution. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users. 

Based on the experience I've had, I would rate it seven out of ten. 

We use SQL Azure to integrate the on-prem resources with the cloud. It creates a replica of our database in the cloud. We have more than 50 users.

SQL Azure is good with transactional systems.

If it's a transitional system, there is a lot of reporting, so the solution becomes a bit slow when it's churning out tons of data, but it's good for a mid-sized application

We've been using SQL Azure for around five years.

We are using SQL Azure extensively. It is still being utilized in the gigabyte and petabyte range for older applications, as well.

We are a gold partner, so we have the option to use gold-tier support.

Deploying SQL Azure is easy. It takes only one engineer to deploy.

We have an enterprise license. 

I rate SQL Azure nine out of 10. I would recommend it to others.

We are deploying a few server-based applications, and we are using the Azure SQL database.

It provides good analytics. We can see which database is getting more requests, etc. We are able to see everything in Azure SQL. Its analytics are in a readable format, so a layman can understand them.

Its performance is good. It has a lot of features. It has the backup feature, which is not there in Amazon RDS. In Azure SQL, there is an option to replicate and restore a database point to point, whereas we can't do that with Amazon RDS.

It is also simpler and more powerful than Amazon RDS. It also has analytics, and it automatically suggests a few things. It has an in-built indexing function.

In terms of support, they don't give much support.

I have been using this solution for four to five years.

There are more than 12,000 people using this service. Its usage is going to increase day by day.

They don't give much support, but their tech support subscription cost is much lesser than AWS.

Its installation is very easy. We can easily move from one pool to another pool in Azure. It takes just one to two minutes.

We take care of it ourselves.

It only has a subscription-based license.

I would recommend this solution to others. I would rate it a ten out of ten.

It is simply our relational database.

It has cut our costs. That's the big thing.

Cost savings are the most valuable. The DR/high availability is also valuable. The failover group with the built-in DR/high availability features is probably one of the easiest things.

Its automation can be improved. SQL Server Agent was a very big part of the on-prem tools. While moving from on-prem to the cloud, redoing some of such tools was very cumbersome in Azure. There was a whole new set of technologies and methodologies. It should have easier automation-type features to be able to implement such tools. It should have almost a SQL agent type of substance built into that.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is very stable. It has been in our production environment for three and a half years, and we have had only one significant outage.

Its scalability is pretty high. Its ability to scale is very good. We're actually in the process of migrating on-prem to Azure, and its scalability is very easy.

In terms of the number of users, there are probably a hundred technical people who are leveraging the technologies. They are developers, administrators, and the BI group.

The setup was pretty straightforward. The networking aspect was non-intuitive, and it was probably the biggest stumbling block when we initially set it up.

We have our DevOps processes that we follow in our deployment, so we establish those initially, and there was a significant amount of testing done prior to putting it into production. On a scale of one to five, it was probably a three in terms of time and effort to get it all implemented.

For its maintenance, there are probably five or six of us, but one person can also maintain it if required. 

I don't have specific numbers, but we were able to cut down the size of our data center by 80%.

I have an annual spend number, and it is in the hundred thousand dollar range. There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees.

Even though you have to look at the cost numbers of what you're going to be charged on a monthly basis, what you have to also remember is that your application may need a lot of rewriting and things like that. You get charged not just for the monthly costs but also for the transactions that occur. If your access to the data layer is not so efficient, your costs will go up because you're pulling far more data than you potentially need. These are hidden costs that nobody ever considers. If your application is not written very efficiently, you may actually increase your costs over on-prem versus cloud.

We are a Microsoft shop. The biggest thing that we probably looked at was AWS. We also looked at some of the Oracle cloud solutions, but we went with Azure only because it just integrates with all of our stuff, and it cuts our costs.

I would rate SQL Azure an eight out of ten.

• Azure SQL database
• Office 365 mail server

We are a solutions provider and we have implemented this solution for many organizations. With these customers, we have managed to reduce a lot of infrastructure budgets and to provide an eco-friendly setup. Organizations can reduce, by a lot, electricity consumption and simplify their cooling plant setup.

It needs to improve the security features, because people still aren't confident enough to use a public cloud.

I've used it for one year alongside Office 365 and Windows VM.

There wasn't much except some issues faced when migrating into the cloud.

Not much.

No issues encountered.

It's very good.

They have very good support and lots of online training as well as having seminars and customer support available. I have joined many sessions through the Microsoft Virtual Academy.

We didn't use a previous solution.

It's not complex and, in actual fact, it's easy. Ready made set-ups are available any time.

The pricing is good, but there is still a gap if you are going to manage a large setup and a big growth of an organization. If that's the case, then pricing will be big challenge especially the pricing forecast and your analysis of growth and IT budget.

I have done some studies of SalesForce AWS among others .

It's a nice, very advanced technology based project that is very secure and cost effective cut edge technology. There are lots of cost and technical resources that can be cut while implementing this solution, to manage cost budget IT infrastructure for any organization.

The primary use case is to pass services for applications of some customers, where they have maybe the front end in dot net and another language, and SQL service in Azure.

The administration console in Azure, all in one is the most valuable feature. Monitoring the transactions in Azure and the elasticity when we need to grow the databases for our customers.

I think that the cost management in SQL is not clear because we may use some tax to identify products, but in some cases identifying the transactions in SQL is not easy for some financial cost centers. Perhaps if in Azure cost management we have the opportunity to monitor the SQL cost in more detail, it will be helpful.

I have been using the solution for around four years.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

In some cases, our customers need to move forward with their SQL projects and when they try to budget in the Azure pricing calculator some costs appear that in the production environment are very different. This becomes problematic for customers when they use SQL Pass services.

We are an IT company, so I'm an architect for that company using Azure solutions. Many users in many companies use SQL. I estimate maybe around 1,000 final users and technical staff from each company are using SQL Azure.

We have a lot of stuff that is still on-prem, and we're only sticking our toe in the water with SQL Azure. For what we're doing, it is a simple database. We haven't yet put any of our harder stuff on Azure.

SQL Azure is in the cloud. So, it has to be the latest version. It is version agnostic.

The main advantage of it is that there is no infrastructure cost. We don't have to host it here. So, there is no infrastructure cost. 

The second advantage is elasticity. We can grow it or shrink it depending on the demand. We have no restraint on capacity.

There is probably more functionality in our on-prem SQL Server than SQL Azure. 

I have been using this solution for about two years.

It is stable, and there are no issues.

Its scalability is very good.

It was straightforward.

We have a third party for its deployment and maintenance.

We have the licensing fee, and we are also paying a third party to maintain it with an SLA.

There is no infrastructure cost, but its running costs are higher than expected. There is the cost of the Azure cloud, which is pricier than expected, but it is not specific to SQL Azure. It is specific to the cloud. You expect it to be cheaper, but it is more expensive to run it.

I would advise going for it and exploring it. We've only dipped our toes in the water. We haven't put any of our main things. We're just toying with a few new applications, and we haven't brought everything across, but I would recommend it.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.