Microsoft Azure SQL Database Reviews

We use SQL Azure for the SAP application, an accounting software that facilitates transactions between different departments. The financial trends we run on SAP are supported by SQL, which is the back end of that application.

The reason we moved to the cloud was for the convenience of not having any physical hardware to maintain. As a technical person, this has reduced the amount of maintenance I need to do, allowing me to focus more on backups since the Azure infrastructure takes care of itself. Additionally, this is cost-effective for the organization since we are not spending much time on servicing infrastructure. Furthermore, it is convenient because we only pay for the time we use the solution, and are not billed for the time we are not using it.

Microsoft could improve its documentation and support. Without the necessary knowledge and expertise, it can be difficult to navigate the platform and find a technical person to guide us through. There is not currently enough documentation available to make it easy to use. If I had not been certified in Azure, I would have faced a lot of difficulties.

I would like reports attached to my phone if there's an error that occurs within SQL Azure or if there are updates that need to run, I would like to receive notifications.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The solution is stable. We only had one outage last year and it didn't even last for 30 minutes.

The solution is scalable.

The technical support has always been good, but recently I had two encounters, last year when I spoke to a consultant from Africa these people provided support, but it almost sounded as if they didn't have enough knowledge. They didn't have enough technical knowledge of my problem to call me back after they had consulted. The support didn't feel like it was Microsoft support contacting me.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward and only took one day.

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 give the solution a ten out of ten. I don't see anything wrong with SQL Azure. I believe it's actually an advantage because previously we had to install SQL solutions on a physical computer. The good thing is that has been translated onto the cloud and that makes it a very good feature. SQL Azure itself, is a robust application that does a lot and integrates with a lot of applications. The reason I like SQL Azure better is that it's easily accessible and the setup is almost exactly the same as we do on the physical machines, but the good thing is there's no machine to maintain the grid.

We selected SQL Azure because it was recommended to us by the safety provider of our accounting software.

I recommend the solution to others.

I primarily use it for accounting and ERP solutions.

I have an old SQL server, and it's not stable. I have two choices, to renew the server or move the data to Azure. So I decided to move everything to the cloud. The database has since become more stable, and I have less troubleshooting, which saves time and money.

The solution could be less expensive. They need to work on their pricing model.

The solution is very stable. I haven't faced any issues up to this point.

It's scalable. I worked sales and marketing for Microsoft and I know it's scalable. You can increase and decrease the specs for the server on demand. When it comes to physical hardware, you can increase the specs if you get the wrong machine. With software, you have to pay more money. You can also easily scale down and decrease the specs and save some money if you like.

I've used technical support for other Microsoft solutions, and I've found them to be very fast in their response time. They'll call you and help you fix the problem.

I've never worked with another cloud solution. This is my first.

The initial setup was straightforward. It took less than one day for deployment. I have a lot of experience, so it might take others three or four days to complete a setup. You only need one person for deployment and maintenance.

I did the implementation myself.

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 didn't really evaluate Amazon or Google. I just read up on them as Microsoft competitors. 

I'm currently moving my system onto the cloud. I'm using a hybrid version of the solution.

My advice to anyone looking to switch to the cloud is to stabilize the technology and to consider Amazon, Azure, and Google. If you don't have experience in the cloud, you have to consider all solutions and pick the best one for your company. I decided to go with Microsoft Azure because of my past experience. So if you don't have the experience to fall back on, consider all technologies as well as their cost, money, and features.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten because of the cost. I'd like it to be cheaper so we can afford to move more of our services to the cloud.

Our primary use case for the solution is for applications. We get many applications in the environment, and most applications use Microsoft SQL, Azure SQL, and DBs, and a few use Postgres SQL. So primarily, the focus is to connect with the DB team and have a specific expert in the SQL environment.

We find the uptime and multi-region features available. Additionally, the dashboard is valuable.

The solution can be improved by reducing the constraints available on cloud and improving support response times.

We have beee using the solution for approximately two years.

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. I rate is as nine out of ten.

We have had a good experience with customer service and support. They are knowledgeable but sometimes take a while to give solutions. I rate customer service and support as seven out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward. I rate is as eight out of ten.

I rate the solution as eight out of ten. The solution is good but can be improved by reducing the constraints on cloud and improving support response times.

Our core business is to make mathematical models for production and solutions. We don't develop or use software. The data comes with the Excel format stored in SQL and we write complex queries about the data and run it in our models. Our data is not sensitive and it's a matter of having a server for storage. I'm a software engineer.

SQL Azure is efficient and very easy to use. The programming facility is very good and the solution is great at solving problems. 

SQL Azure could offer a lot more services and applications. I'd also like to see some tools that we could use on the SQL Server for data virtualization. That would be an improvement. 

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

We don't run critical data and haven't had any issues with the stability. 

We have a lot of experience and good programmers and IT administrators in the company, so we haven't needed customer support. 

Our implementation was straightforward and carried out internally. We have 10 users of this solution, the majority are in production and engineering, with a couple in software engineering. 

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. 

This solution is more expensive than some others, but not as expensive as Amazon, Google and Oracle, which all have a lot of extra costs involved. 

I recommend this solution and rate it 10 out of 10. 

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.

Our primary use case for SQL Azure is to operate our database.

The features I like most is that it offers a lot of securitt verification and backup from our side as well as from within SQL Azure.

Security can sometimes be a problem when it affects our business needs. It needs to integrate more security without stopping the service or our business. In some cases we have a lot of restriction on people who needs to use the database for whatever reason. We need more performance but in the same way we need more security - from the application and also in the Internet. The problem is therefore in the internet. 

The stability is good at the moment. We are more dependable on the stability from the internet from our service provider. The solution is responsible for 99% of the stability, but most of our problems are due to our local internet provider.

The scalability is good. We have 100 users and one can upgrade the system by performance and by the size of the storage. You can move between different types of storage using block or docket. You can use any way you choose without losing data. So the scalability it is very good. We plan to increase our usage.

We are planning to redo the assessment about whether more people should be involved in the technical support. 

The initial setup was very complex. It is hard to explain, but the problem is when you have more than one service. We have only one service but the solution has multiple capabilities. 

The deployment team installed the solution on one machine at a time, so it took very long. I chose a big database and within less than nine minutes I was able to collect data. So that was much faster.

We used a vendor team and they have one or two guys who are responsible for the maintenance. 

When it comes to implementation, my advice would be to integrate between Microsoft platforms. I will rate it an eight out of ten as I would love to see faster integration.

There is significant abstraction from beginner to intermediate database administration responsibilities. In this way, I can focus on my business objectives, as opposed to heavy upfront cost of ownership when compared to on-premises or IaaS alternatives.

It provides faster turnaround time to getting solutions customer facing.

It could have closer parity to on-premises capabilities. Introduce a graph database engine component.

I have been using Azure since its inception.

Historically, SQL Azure has tended to choke at databases larger than 50GB, and in some cases, as small as 20GB. Granted, this starts becoming a function of database design.

Caveat: It's been a while since I last attempted to put larger sets of data into a single SQL Azure database. Now, if you don't use resilient connection tolerance practices (or technologies), then it may feel unstable. Here again, it becomes a function of design.

In other words, if you simply choose to use on-premises traditional designs and principles when interacting with SQL Azure, then there is a higher probability of it "feeling" unstable.

I've seen and experienced some amazing service and then I've endured appalling interactions, too.

This becomes a function of your SQL engine skill, the diligence and appropriateness of your design, the support tier you purchased, and some luck if you connected with a support engineer who not only spoke your language, but also carried an attitude of chasing down a solution.

The setup is super straightforward. I don't really find that question useful, or at least as useful as, "What is it like incrementally adjusting the design of the database?"

This is where Microsoft's eco-system further outshines the alternatives. Again, this is a much longer discussion, but it's folly to choose a platform, and even a technology, without considering the lifecycle of changes.

In an agile world, you have to ask how you are going to get that data tier to respond efficiently and within business requirements and tolerances.

It's an elastic service, at least in its simplest definition, and a proactive one with some reactive capability. Therefore, there is value in monitoring usage and adjusting proactively to gain optimal savings.

Alternatives tended to be IaaS offerings hammered or butchered to be PaaS. So, frankly, the answer is that I don't know of other PaaS alternatives.

SQL Azure is a good option for maintaining structured data, especially for smaller databases (0 - 25GB).

My solutions today leverage a plethora of structured and unstructured data. Therefore, having this service in close proximity to the resource groups I use for the other services is beneficial.

It does tend to constrain me to the Azure platform, as I've yet to find a vendor who can give me the RDBMS PaaS offering. Constrain makes it sound like “suck up some pain”. However, I have yet to find the Azure platform limiting.

Here is some context or insight. I was previously on the product team that heavily influenced the direction and feature set of SQL Server, both box (on-premises) and cloud. My focus and specialty is related to scaling the RDBMS tier to support high-demand applications.

To that end, SQL Azure was very useful for a certain set of business problems. At the time, I certainly would not have recommended anything larger than 50GB residing in a SQL Azure database.

I also felt strongly that a significant value proposition of cloud-based RDBMS solutions lay in the as yet untapped elastic-scale possibilities.

To that end, I developed a framework for customers to leverage, which found its way (in a crippled form) into what is today's SQL Azure elastic feature. What I'm trying to say is that true elastic-scale and distributed scale of SQL Azure is hobbled. That frustrates me.

The value proposition of using SQL Azure for mobile and web app solutions is also significant, and it remains as strong as ever. This is especially the case for solutions that enjoy the benefits of structured data.

The on-going improvements of SQL Azure reaching parity with an on-premises feature set is making SQL Azure a viable option for many applications that previously couldn't even begin to look at cloud-based, non-IaaS, therefore PaaS, offerings.

In my current role, I consider SQL Azure the leader for cloud-based RDBMS solutions, far ahead of any other cloud-based RBMS offering. Where I have structured data, SQL Azure is my de facto storage tier.

• Cloud products reduce the cost of the production of software products
• You do not have to buy the product at the up-front market cost
• You pay for it as you use the product
• You can develop a product on your own premises
• Just give the key to the vendor, so that there are no separate deployment costs.
• You save on travel and meals, as well as housing required for a development team required for deployment and implementation.
• The distance between the client and development team is invisible.
• You may arrange virtual-real trainings/demos based on the affordability of the client’s budget.
• There is no requirement of special hardware, as costs and additional software are bared by the cloud platform. You can spend as you need based on what the client’s needs are and scale hardware and software up to the client’s needs.
• Cost of the platform and the software upgrades are covered under the service contract.

We developed our product with a small team of .NET developers for a client, a law university in Delhi, India.

We received the requirements from conversations of our team with our client, over the phone, and with email.

There was minimal training required for the team to be trained in cloud, as every developer in the team had basic .NET skills.

This product was then intended to be used by law university students for their training in court room sessions as student lawyers debating against each other to deduce lawful judgements of a case under study.

We provided virtual chat rooms for the students and had facilitated a method to share video sessions of their debates in virtual court rooms.

Microsoft has delivered on its promise by providing a free, developer-student (community) edition of Visual Studio.

I have used this for around 6-9 months to develop and implement the product.

There are questions in the developers’ and clients’ minds:

• Since Azure is a pay-by-use product, what is the provision for the future?
• If, for some reason, we lost this provision, what fallback parachute is Microsoft planning for customers?
• What risk planning and hedging should the client do? There is no such possibility, but the concern must be addressed by Microsoft.

Physically owned products are also subject to failure. The hardware on premise also fails and needs to be maintained, so there is expected downtime.

Microsoft provides mirroring of cloud servers. There is a sure provision of backup and restore of the cloud environment.

By centralizing these services and products at a central location (datacenter), we are optimizing on services and goods cost and sharing these costs with other cloud dwellers.

By going towards the cloud, we are going towards a virus and spyware free environment.

We are moving away from special, owned hardware and products, to cloud-based datacenters, which exist in the other resource rich, low cost, areas.

This is Platform as a Service of the SOA revolution.

Along with overseas datacenters, we shall promote near shore or local datacenters to capitalize on the cloud advantage. We will also address issues of risk hedging, which will spur job growth in local areas.

We didn’t have any scalability problems.

We did not explore this option, but the response was good for whatever we did request.

We switched due to the advantages I mentioned earlier.

You don’t have to install the product on the cloud platform. You receive a login with pre-pared software installs. Custom requirements need to be implemented or requested.

Every region of a country has cheaper locations that can provide cost advantages, and data center growth must be equally distributed on earth with electricity and resource rich, low cost, areas to keep the cost of the cloud minimal. This will also avert natural and man-made calamities.

The United States and other countries can take this cloud option to the next level of off-shoring without any immigration and terrorism issues, enabling development in impoverished areas of the world.

This can further cut down the cost of software development, other "down-the-line" products, services and goods, and will empower the poor and neglected of the world.

This will also improve trade between the countries. There are always imbalances amongst populations in any country in skills and monetary status. An equalizer could be achieved by allowing more trade, more freedom, and more pollination.

In India, we had to start development using the 3-month free subscription Azure platform .net and SQL . Now as far as I know, vs 2015 community edition is a free download. One can develop software application in it and deploy it with an Azure subscription which is pay as you use. All nitty-gritty development can be done by a development team. That's why Microsoft has delivered their dream cloud promise with the zero cost alternative of community edition.

We considered local cloud and physical install options. These options were expensive and less effective.

Microsoft Cloud is reliable and dependable.