Microsoft Azure SQL Database Reviews

We like the collaborative nature of the solution. It's the most valuable aspect of the solution.

The stability of the solution is very good.

The availability of resources could be improved.

The solution needs to offer online training to help improve the capacity of teams to manage the SQL.

The pricing is very high.

I've been using the solution for two years so far.

We haven't had any issues with the stability of the solution. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable for us.

We haven't had any issues with the solution, therefore, we haven't required any technical support. I can't speak to the quality of technical support as I've never dealt with them.

In the beginning, we decided to use a specialist to configure all the systems for us and the solution is almost perfect.

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.

We're simply customers. We don't have any professional relationship with Azure.

I would recommend the solution. It's great.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. I'd give it perfect marks if the pricing was more reasonable and if they offered better learning tools to guide our staff.

I work for a consulting firm which uses the technology marketing projects from Microsoft and other IT vendors, re-routing the product, and creating a technical and architectural guide;  basically I work on the consulting assignments. I am a lead consultant in one of the leading IT companies in India and I've been implementing bridges and consulting in an architectural support role. I've been using Azure as a stack and that's where my proficiency is. We're partners with Azure. 

This has become a very global solution. The big advantage is the UI which has been simplified. The coding doesn't require much effort so it's valuable in that sense. They have invested a lot in security and compliance so it's also a good product in that area.

The product has many features that might not be explored by many end users because there isn't much technical guidance available. If I'm interested in understanding a particular feature I'd like there to be some kind of explore button that would provide technical in-depth assistance, and that's lacking for now. There is very little technical documentation. 

As already mentioned, additional features should include technical documentation on the product features. Secondly, there could also be some improvement in performance. I know they have done benchmark testing but sometimes performance is lacking. They can improve in that area too. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

This is a good and stable product. 

I don't think scalability is an issue, it's just a matter of adding more RAM as the users increase. 

Technical support is good but adding technical documentation would really make a difference. 

The initial setup is straightforward and the deployment is very easy because it's a UI based migration. There's no hard coding. I believe deployment takes maybe two or three hours to get the environment set up and to be able to start exploring. We had one person  responsible for deployment and we have three or four people dealing with maintenance in a company of close to 200 people. 

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. 

If you're looking for many features in one product with easy usability and UI, then this product is good. You can readily add on features and exploration and all those things. They are adding features all the time so they are creating one large solution, which is like a repository for things like big data and sensors. The SQL Server encapsulates all the requirements.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

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.

We use the public cloud model of this solution. 

With Azure, we can achieve very high workloads (~6K queries/min) and, if necessary, scale databases in real-time with only one minute of downtime for our customers. It enables us to scale up on demand and to scale down when needed. 

The most valuable feature of Azure Database is the read-scaleout one: in Premium and Business tiers, the logic single DB consists of 4 identical DBs, the main one (writable) and three read-only synchronized copies; in our application we can use the three read-only copies for almost all of the read-only query and this allows workload distribution and minimizes the concurrency in write operations.

They have good documentation. It's concentrated information. 

Migrating existing application to SQL database had many problems, developing a new app for Azure Database not. 

Their support is nice but frequently their responses aren't effective. 

The documentation is always updated with the latest features but the documentation for the database features should be better. It doesn't specify when specific features will be released. The documentation needs improvement. They should improve the way they explain the information to the market.

It should have better support for UTF 8 (a feature already present on the on-premises version of SQL Database 2019) a for Hadoop integration.

It is stable. 

It is very scalable. 

The initial setup was incredibly easy. Moving from a standard tier to a business tier is not so easy and the documentation isn't so clear the presence of the read scale out copies.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

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.

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.

We offer this solution as part of a bundle to our customers for which we offer technical services. We are aiming to have a centralized marketplace.

We have experience with hybrid, on-premises, and public cloud deployments. We have a complex environment and are slowly transitioning to this solution. Our production environment is the only one that we're putting into Microsoft Azure. For security reasons, we still have some systems on-premises.

The DR for this solution is Active/Active.

This solution offers high availability, and business continuity is in place.

This solution would be improved with the inclusion of better self-service tools.

It needs to be easier for my technical teams to perform support tasks.

This solution is scalable. Multiple tiers and multiple layers are there. 

We are still very early in the process and have not yet had many use cases. However, at this stage, Microsoft is working proactively with us. We have premium-level support.

The initial setup of this solution is usually complex, especially for an enterprise customer. This solution is tailored to specific customers, which is why complexity varies.

The typical deployment takes six months.

Our Total Cost of Operations is cheaper using this solution as compared to an on-premises deployment.

The licensing for this solution is based on subscription. We have an enterprise license, so the price of this solution is high.

I recommend this solution, as long as the cloud environment is suitable.

This is a good solution, but from the angle of security, everything can be breached.

I would rate this solution 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.