Microsoft Azure SQL Database Reviews

We use it for benefits management in the healthcare domain. 

It helps us deploy new applications very quickly. We have set up everything on Azure, including SQL Azure. 

It has a lot of out-of-the-box features, which is useful. It is easy to move applications for disaster recovery or availability, and all these features are out of the box.

It is easily scalable, and it is faster than SQL Server. It is also less expensive than using SQL Server. It has the pay-as-you-go model, and the charges are based on the usage.

There are some limitations for cross-database queries and features. The migration of data from older systems should be easier.

For deployment, there are too many options, which sometimes makes it difficult to figure out the best option. There is not enough information to help you to find the best option for deployment. There should be more documentation about this.

I have been using this solution for a couple of years.

It is easily scalable. We have around 60 to 70 users. We'll be increasing its usage. We are gradually moving to SQL Azure for all our requirements.

Their technical support is prompt, but some of our issues have not been addressed, even though the team is trying. We didn't have a good experience with them for a couple of issues, but overall, they have been good.

We got everything ready-made in Azure because our all applications are in the .NET framework and SQL, so we found SQL Azure to be the most suitable option.

It is straightforward, but if you're migrating data from SQL Server, it is quite time-consuming and not so easy.

I am not aware of the exact pricing, but our monthly bill for Azure is around 80,000. It is less expensive than using SQL Server. It has the pay-as-you-go model, and the charges are based on the usage.

If you are migrating from older systems, you should know that CLR is not supported in SQL Azure. Data migration can also be a challenge.

I would rate SQL Azure a nine 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.

What I like the most is the processes and the easiness of deployments.

What I don't like is the personalization of an instance is difficult to deploy. Sometimes it's hard if you want to make a cluster of SQLs on Azure; it's not a good approach, but sometimes it worked out for me.

If I have to do something very specific to the instance, sometimes I am not allowed to leave those types of configurations because they need it to be broader. They are not at the level that I need to make the configurations that I want.

The configuration is the only area to be improved. Everything else is what it is and what we expected. The configuration is the area that is most cumbersome.

I have been using SQL Azure for two years.

I have the latest version. I always update to the latest version.

It's a very stable solution.

SQL Azure is perfectly scalable.

We have a team of 20 to 25 developers who are using this solution for development. 

Also, we have thousands of clients for the databases that are using it.

Technical support is fast, it's reliable, and they are knowledgeable.

If your problem is in the knowledge base then support is very good. If it's not in the knowledge base, then it's central and not on the Microsoft roadmap.

The initial setup is more complex than it is straightforward.

The easiest deployment requires an hour. If you have a one-by-one project that consists of migration and replication, it can take several weeks.

Using SQL Azure really depends on the settings that you want to deploy, or the amount of money that you want to spend. If you are deploying and thinking that something will grow so that you can align your income to pay per use, then it's pretty good. 

If you are considering something where your payments or your income is not related to pay-per-use, you may consider using it on-premises during the beginning. It really depends on your settings.

Overall, this solution is pretty good.

There are still some areas that have to develop, but I would rate SQL Azure an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for its Data Lake and Data Warehouse, in both cases for our customers.

The solution is easily integrated into other SQL solutions. It's flexible in that sense.

The solution is a fairly mature product. It provides good stability.

The initial setup isn't too difficult.

There is very good documentation. It's unbelievable, the amount of documentation on offer through Microsoft's site.

The security features are quite good.

In terms of management, you can't really pause things. It doesn't allow for that kind of capability.

From a security perspective, although their features are decent, they can always be improved upon, updated, and refined to help protect clients better.

I would love it if that had dynamic data masking and features of that nature.

I've been using the solution for two years at least at this point.

The stability of the solution is pretty good. It's a mature product, so you don't get bugs or glitches, and they update it regularly. It doesn't crash. It's reliable.

The solution can scale well. That's not a problem at all. If a company needs to scale, they can do so easily.

Microsoft's technical support is great. We're satisfied with their service. They have a pretty extensive online database and an online community that is quite helpful. It's all very helpful.

If you need to reach them in person, you need to have a licensing agreement in place. If you purchase that, you can get more personalized assistance.

We previously used SQL on-premises servers. It's very easy to migrate over to the cloud if you have that setup. It's basically one-to-one.

The initial setup isn't complex. It's pretty straightforward. However, it does take a long time to provision and manage everything. It can take a couple of hours typically to deploy the solution.

You do have to pay for technical support. If you have it in your licensing agreement, you will gain access to a team you can call if you run into issues.

I'm not sure of the exact licensing costs. From a cloud perspective, a client would be charged based on consumption, so the pricing would depend on elements such as how many users or how many queries (and how complex), et cetera. 

I do know that it's competitive pricing, however. Most solutions of this caliber are around the same price. They compete with each other.

We're Microsoft partners.

The solution is constantly being updated. We're on whatever the latest version/update is at any given time.

We're a consultancy, so we work with a variety of clients and adjust solutions based on their needs.

I'd advise new users to take advantage of the documentation on offer from Microsoft. It will really help them understand the solution.

Overall, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

It is basically hosting the backend of our application that we write as a software development company. We're moving our educational timetabling software, which was historically an on-premise installation, to a cloud-based service offering for customers.

It is pretty much version-less in the sense that we are using whatever is presented to us and available. We are purely using the cloud-based services from Azure hosted in the cloud, which obviously and technically is version-less to some degree. We are using SQL Azure, app services, Application Gateway, key vaults, and storage solutions within Azure. It is relatively simple but sufficient for our needs at the moment.

We predominantly don't use the GUI interface. We are using Terraform as our infrastructure and code provider to manage and maintain all of the Azure components that we are using. They're offering all the integration and providing it through the APIs.

We have come from hosting on-premise for customers, or they've done it themselves with SQL. We've now taken a cloud offering for the equivalent services of standard database management and the inbuilt backup and restore offerings. The scalability is probably the biggest feature that we are benefiting from by being in the cloud.

We haven't had any major issues that have prevented us from doing stuff fundamentally. For its implementation, sometimes, it is complicated to understand what your needs are. It would be good to have a few use cases that provide different cloud variations that match on-premise installations and show how they can be moved to the cloud a bit better.

Its pricing is complicated and can be improved. We need a better offering. Making it cheaper is always a good thing for us.

I have been using this solution for two years.

We haven't had any issues. It has been up and available and working when we needed it to. We haven't had any outages that we're aware of.

There are not many users at the moment because we're still in pre-production. We're sort of in beta testing at the moment.

It probably has 50 users currently. It is not a very large tool. We are planning to expand its usage as we build out our actual software ourselves, which we're still working on. We'll be making that available to customers, and we'll be offering that as a global opportunity for customers.

I have not been in touch with their technical support.

We were just using Microsoft on-premise SQL, and we've migrated to Azure in the cloud. It basically is like for like, as far as we're concerned.

It depends on which area you're coming from. If you're using the GUI, it's relatively simple. Understanding what your needs are sometimes is a bit more complicated. Understanding the availability of things like Elastic pools took us a little bit of time to get our heads around but, otherwise, it is pretty simple. They could provide some use cases for this.

It is hard to provide the deployment duration because it wasn't just Azure on its own that we were having to deal with. We were taking our on-premise product and converting it. Preparing the infrastructure and doing it via the likes of Terraform took us probably about three months overall, but that was more about getting up to speed on the tools to do it, as opposed to individual components such as SQL.

The pricing is actually complicated, and that is probably one downside of it. In some respects, although we can plan for the costs on a month-by-month basis, we are finding it hard to project our costings for it. 

Fundamentally, Microsoft is offering two pricing models, and it is challenging to understand the differences between the two. We're basically on the DTU model at the moment. That may change in the future as the size grows, but it is one of those things that we'll end up monitoring as we progress. 

At the moment, to get a reasonable response, generally, the price is a little high for us, but it is one of those things for which we know that we can do improvements on our code. So, it is not just the service that's the problem; it is some of the things that we need to do as well.

I would recommend it depending upon the use case. If you need an on-premise service, then you would choose the on-premise SQL, and if you need a cloud-based one, then I'd suggest SQL on the cloud. The scalability of SQL in the cloud is far simpler than the scalability of SQL on-premise. This is one benefit that the cloud edition has over the on-premise version that people could consider.

I would rate SQL Azure an eight out of 10.

We're slowly progressing through the delivery of our production system or landing zone in the cloud. Nothing is in production yet.

Its cost benefit is most valuable because you are charged per data unit instead of licensing. You can easily migrate your on-premise SQL to the cloud with a managed instance. That's what it is designed to do. It is easy to take your on-premise or older SQL instance and move it to the cloud. It makes it easy to get off your on-premise SQL and start utilizing the cost benefit of the cloud.

I'm not really a SQL DBA, so I can't go into the depths of the areas that need to be improved. They can maybe make it a bit easier to educate people on how to develop SQL Server in Azure. They can provide some free seminars and webinars and more training in general for easier migration. I know there is some stuff on Microsoft learning, but it would be helpful and useful to have more up-to-date content.

We've been dabbling with it for the last couple of years. 

Based on our experience, it is very stable and very reliable.

It has got Microsoft's backbone on it. It is very scalable. At this stage, we don't have many users because we're still busy migrating over to Azure cloud. In the next year, we'll probably have close to a million customers because that's what we've got on our books.

I have interacted with them. They are very good for out-of-the-book solutions, but when we get to integrations with non-Microsoft applications, it can be a little bit more tricky. You also have to involve the vendor of that specific product to deal with problems related to integration, but, in general, Microsoft's support is pretty good. I've never found it to be poor in any way.

For the number of customers we have, we probably only need three or four people, which is not a lot. If you look at it that way, it is actually quite cost-effective.

It is beneficial in terms of cost because you are charged per data unit instead of licensing.

I would absolutely recommend this solution to others. If they are going for Azure, they probably don't have a choice. I would advise others to get used to all the options and ideas of SQL PaaS, SQL managed instances, and SQL on VMs. They should get their head around which one is best for their company. They should make sure that it fits their company's vision of where they want to go with their databases because it may or may not be the best solution for everybody. That's why there are a couple of options, so just make sure to select the right one.

I would rate SQL Azure an eight out of ten. It is best in many ways. There is nothing better than this from Microsoft from the database aspect.

I use SQL Azure strictly for active data rescue.

All of my work is stored in the Microsoft Azure Cloud.

I am working on a special product with another person — it's a secret product, so, unfortunately, I can't talk about it.

I am very happy with this solution; right now, I don't think there is anything I would change.

More power should be included between the upgrades. We started with a less costly service but we needed more power. We paid a lot and upgraded but we still needed more power. The power should increase more between each upgrade.

I have been using SQL Azure for three years.

SQL Azure is both very stable and scalable.

I have never had to contact customer support. There are several educational sites that I pay for that supply me with help.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It's online, so I didn't need to install anything. I just had to choose options and activate them. 

How much we pay is determined by how much we upgrade or downgrade our services. If you downgrade the service you pay less if you upgrade the services you pay more.

Microsoft has a cheap license for developers. Still, it was expensive for us because we are not a company, and we don't use crowdfunding, we used our own money to pay for the license.

I would recommend SQL Azure to others.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of ten.

Right now, with Azure, we have everything we need. The only problem we have with Azure is regarding the price.

I am a consultant and some of my clients use this solution for their database.

SQL Azure is a platform, as opposed to a product. You do not select a specific version. It has very little administrative ability, such as the ability to back it up, but it offers much more comfort for the user.

This solution has all of the advantages that are available in a normal SQL server, except it is presented in an online environment that can be used from everywhere. It provides fast access to data because the SQL server can calculate where the data is. It is a complexity of order one. So, it does not depend on the size of the table. This is why SQL servers are the favorite data source for any website.

This solution provides more comfort to the end-user compared to a normal SQL server.

This solution suffers from the same problems that come about in a normal SQL server. One issue is the optimization of function-heavy evaluations. If you define your own functions, the execution plan of the SQL server performs sub-passes of the execution path, which makes the process very slow. Even if there are very easy means to optimize them, it is still slow. The server should perform automatic function optimization. This is a problem in any implementation, Azure or otherwise.

The management is entirely controlled by Microsoft, so there are some restrictions.

The solution is as stable as any SQL server. I agree with others who say that SQL is more stable than the Microsoft operating systems.

This is a scalable solution.

If you have a support contract then it is excellent. They will work at the problem until it has been resolved. The support is very professional.

Our customer in Luxembourg is using an Oracle server, rather than SQL Azure because it was a specification of the project. I am not the one who decides which database technology will be used by my clients.

This is the best product that Microsoft has. It is the same product as a normal SQL server but built on Azure. The management is different, depending on the hoster of the cloud.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.