Learn what your peers think about Microsoft Azure SQL Database. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
IT Support Engineer - AZURE Administrator at Mindspring Computing
Real User
Top 20
2023-02-22T11:39:20Z
Feb 22, 2023
When looking at the long-term expenses associated with running software on an on-premises server, the costs are almost equivalent but when we include insurance for devices, onsite fees for servers, and other related costs, we may find that this is a cost-effective solution.
I rate SQL Azure eight out of 10 for affordability. I live in a developing country where cost is always an issue. The price should be negotiable, and there should be more discounts.
When you go with SQL Azure Database, you can create a small database, which is around $4 to $5 per month for development purposes. It's very cheap in that respect. I think it's a little bit expensive compared to other services that Microsoft offers on Azure. PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB are a bit cheaper than SQL Server. If the price were lower, I think it would become more attractive for developers to use.
General Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 10
2022-05-31T13:26:00Z
May 31, 2022
With one being expensive and five being competitive, I would give the product a four out of five as it's relatively competitive. It is also important to note that pricing is based on usage.
In terms of the cost, SQL Azure is a pay-per-use solution, particularly because it's a cloud subscription, so you pay as much as you use it, but I cannot give a number because I don't manage the cost or the price for this solution.
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.
The pricing is prevalent for everything Microsoft. The thing is, they don't allow different pricing for different regions. Some countries are price sensitive.
Data Center Operations Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2022-01-30T06:38:01Z
Jan 30, 2022
We have had some issues with the licensing of the solution. We pay for the solution monthly and we are on a one-year contract. The enterprise edition is very expensive and the standard addition is lacking some functions.
software engineer at a university with 11-50 employees
Real User
2021-10-27T10:41:25Z
Oct 27, 2021
Our license is pay-as-you-go and we pay around €200 per month. You need to keep an eye on this because with scaling the cost can increase quite quickly.
Consultant at kulki data management & consultants
Real User
2021-10-06T10:40:00Z
Oct 6, 2021
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.
Chief Technology Officer & Vice President, Delivery at a recruiting/HR firm with 1-10 employees
Real User
2021-05-01T06:25:06Z
May 1, 2021
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.
Program Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 20
2021-04-22T20:41:54Z
Apr 22, 2021
All products are licensed. The cost depends on someone's usage space. The more you use it, the more you pay. Some are billed in terms of fixed cost. For example, if I provision some work with a machine that I pay for it, even if I don't use it. There are multiple ways you could potentially pay.
It is expensive. Snowflake and PostgreSQL are cheaper than this. Google is also cheaper than Azure. Its licensing is on a pay-as-you-go basis. It is based on usage and storage.
Senior Database Administrator at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2021-02-23T12:23:43Z
Feb 23, 2021
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.
Associate Manager at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
2021-02-15T13:51:38Z
Feb 15, 2021
They have standard subscriptions that are not the entire version. If you have a full version of your subscription then you have the entire version that you can download. When you no longer need it, you can just stop the services. You can reduce the amount you pay, which is an advantage. Essentially, it's a pay and use mechanism. It's reasonably priced and when you compare it with other products in the cloud environment, it's cheaper.
IT Manager at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 20
2020-11-03T14:57:19Z
Nov 3, 2020
It is quite expensive. I would definitely recommend not using the pay-as-you-go model because this will just mean all your money will go to Microsoft. So, really make sure to control resource usage as much as possible.
Co-Founder & Managing Director at a marketing services firm with 1-10 employees
Real User
2020-10-22T19:54:00Z
Oct 22, 2020
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.
Solution Principal at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
2020-09-27T04:10:14Z
Sep 27, 2020
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.
The price is very high, especially when you compare it to other solutions. There aren't extra costs, however. All fees are included in the licensing package.
Lead Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Consultant
2020-06-18T05:17:42Z
Jun 18, 2020
The solution is a little expensive but not too bad in comparison to other products on the market and since I am using the cloud version it's really not too much. There are no additional costs.
IT Manager at a pharma/biotech company with 201-500 employees
Real User
2019-08-04T07:38:00Z
Aug 4, 2019
We pay less than $1000 monthly in licensing fees. There are no additional costs. When you start to use the cloud, you can move other services to the cloud as well. So I think we will pay more in the future when we move other services over. But right now we only use the ERP system with SQL Cloud.
Enterprise End User Operations at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2019-07-31T05:52:00Z
Jul 31, 2019
We have a three-year contract. The cost was somewhere around $70-80,000 for the original deployment, which was about two years ago. In the future, we may need to expand our license to include more company employees.
Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a relational database-as-a-service that delivers predictable performance, scalability, business continuity, data protection, and near-zero administration to cloud developers and solution architects. This is the deep technical library for Azure SQL Database.
SQL Azure is an expensive solution.
The solution is more cost-effective than Google BigQuery. Compared to Google BigQuery, downloading data can be more expensive.
I recommend considering a pay-as-you-go pricing model initially.
I find that they are relatively expensive, especially when compared to AWS, where the prices are notably lower.
Compared to other providers, it's definitely on the affordable side.
I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten.
The price of the solution is reasonable.
The solution is expensive.
The price could be slightly cheaper. Our customers pay for licenses annually.
The solution is moderately expensive. I rate the pricing a six out of ten.
SQL Azure's licensing cost is expensive.
The pricing is flexible and can be adapted based on our requirements but the pricing options are complex especially if we are using a VM.
When looking at the long-term expenses associated with running software on an on-premises server, the costs are almost equivalent but when we include insurance for devices, onsite fees for servers, and other related costs, we may find that this is a cost-effective solution.
I rate SQL Azure eight out of 10 for affordability. I live in a developing country where cost is always an issue. The price should be negotiable, and there should be more discounts.
When you go with SQL Azure Database, you can create a small database, which is around $4 to $5 per month for development purposes. It's very cheap in that respect. I think it's a little bit expensive compared to other services that Microsoft offers on Azure. PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB are a bit cheaper than SQL Server. If the price were lower, I think it would become more attractive for developers to use.
We find the solution to be less expensive than other options.
We have a yearly licensing fee we need to pay. It's not a cheap solution.
I believe the licensing is more on a global scale.
The price in general of Azure SQL could improve.
With one being expensive and five being competitive, I would give the product a four out of five as it's relatively competitive. It is also important to note that pricing is based on usage.
In terms of the cost, SQL Azure is a pay-per-use solution, particularly because it's a cloud subscription, so you pay as much as you use it, but I cannot give a number because I don't manage the cost or the price for this solution.
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.
It only has a subscription-based license.
The pricing is prevalent for everything Microsoft. The thing is, they don't allow different pricing for different regions. Some countries are price sensitive.
We have had some issues with the licensing of the solution. We pay for the solution monthly and we are on a one-year contract. The enterprise edition is very expensive and the standard addition is lacking some functions.
Azure SQL has licenses which you can pay yearly or monthly. You have the option to pay yearly or monthly for the license.
Our license is pay-as-you-go and we pay around €200 per month. You need to keep an eye on this because with scaling the cost can increase quite quickly.
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 would like it to be cheaper, but comparatively, it is reasonably priced.
You do need to pay a license fee in order to use the product. I can't speak to the exact price.
It is beneficial in terms of cost because you are charged per data unit instead of licensing.
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.
Its price can definitely be lower. It is pretty pricey.
All products are licensed. The cost depends on someone's usage space. The more you use it, the more you pay. Some are billed in terms of fixed cost. For example, if I provision some work with a machine that I pay for it, even if I don't use it. There are multiple ways you could potentially pay.
There is a license required to use the solution and it cost $30 to do the installation.
It requires a license. As compared to its competitors, such as Oracle, it is affordable and reasonable.
It is expensive. Snowflake and PostgreSQL are cheaper than this. Google is also cheaper than Azure. Its licensing is on a pay-as-you-go basis. It is based on usage and storage.
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.
They have standard subscriptions that are not the entire version. If you have a full version of your subscription then you have the entire version that you can download. When you no longer need it, you can just stop the services. You can reduce the amount you pay, which is an advantage. Essentially, it's a pay and use mechanism. It's reasonably priced and when you compare it with other products in the cloud environment, it's cheaper.
It is quite expensive. I would definitely recommend not using the pay-as-you-go model because this will just mean all your money will go to Microsoft. So, really make sure to control resource usage as much as possible.
Pricing is reasonable for a big enterprise. The price is a little higher. It should have a 20% discount.
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.
It is reasonable.
It is expensive for us. We are looking for something less expensive and thinking of migrating the whole system.
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.
The cost of the solution isn't too high. It's pretty reasonable.
The price is very high, especially when you compare it to other solutions. There aren't extra costs, however. All fees are included in the licensing package.
The solution is a little expensive but not too bad in comparison to other products on the market and since I am using the cloud version it's really not too much. There are no additional costs.
We pay less than $1000 monthly in licensing fees. There are no additional costs. When you start to use the cloud, you can move other services to the cloud as well. So I think we will pay more in the future when we move other services over. But right now we only use the ERP system with SQL Cloud.
I'm not sure what the exact price is, but it's a moderate amount. It's not too expensive.
We have a three-year contract. The cost was somewhere around $70-80,000 for the original deployment, which was about two years ago. In the future, we may need to expand our license to include more company employees.
The licensing for this solution is based on subscription. We have an enterprise license, so the price of this solution is high.
The pricing is okay. It's not too expensive.
We are using the free version. It's free of charge for one developer.