Microsoft Azure SQL Database Reviews

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.

Our primary use case is for content management and publishing offsite for external users. We also use it as the intranet to get the largest professional view of the SharePoint version.

In SQL we tend to do normal queries. The features we use quite a bit are the backup and monitoring and also the export and import tools for data. We use all of these on a daily basis.

We're still discovering aspects of the solution. We haven't yet deployed all of the components, so I'm not sure of what additional features we'd like to see.

The stability is good and the performance is fantastic. Even when we try to do an inquiry into issues we can do it easily. The administration of the tool itself is perfect and the performance is good. On the safety level, we have layers of a firewall. I think this makes it more secure, to help secure the level of encryption and the encryption of the data itself. 

We deploy the solution on four machines and are using VMware. We can continue to add on top of this as much as we like. Scalability isn't a problem at all.

We have many layers of technical support, starting with us and our own team. The vendor of our region also provides support if we need it.

The initial setup is complex.

We had to do some data collecting and we had issues with having redundant databases, meaning we had to do some synchronization between the databases. We did the integration of the networks and handled the clustering on top of the components of SQL. At the beginning we faced some issues, especially getting the servers to talk to each other. We needed to do some workarounds, but ultimately we were successful.

We did the implementation ourselves. 

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.

We did a survey for seeing what technologies were in the market. We ended up with Microsoft because of the general business requirements. Also, we could add the components to the solution for product management. We could add document management, for example, and many other alternatives that covered various business requirements. We ended up with this solution because of the ability to utilize the components. We also had the flexibility of using other plug-ins that helped with the commercial aspects of the business.

We use the private cloud version of the solution.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. I would recommend it.

I primarily use the solution for continuous integration and continuous delivery.

Azure DevOps is the feature that is the most valuable aspect of the solution for us.

I need Microsoft to allow their network to access open source technologies.

The solution is very stable. Microsoft is one of the most stable platforms. It offers 100% stability.

I would rate scalability as ten out of ten.

We have been satisfied with technical support. We're a big Azure customer. I don't know if a normal customer or a start-up would get the same support from Microsoft but we are a big customer and we've paid a lot of money for the solution, so we have a good amount of attention from support.

Previously we used open-source solutions and relied on the abilities of our techs. But now we're paying to have a big organization that can help manage and handle our projects.

The initial setup is very easy. It's extremely straightforward.

The pricing is okay. It's not too expensive.

The solution is very user-friendly. I would recommend the solution. It's very easy to understand.

I would rate this solution ten out of ten.

I primarily use the solution to study SQL.

It provides regular database functionality

The solution needs to improve its customer network, including its online support.

In the next release, I'd like to see Azure SQL improve user rights management and user rights control management.

The solution is very stable.

The solution offers up options for scalability. Right now, in our organization, only one person is using Azure SQL and they are using it daily.

Technical support is okay.

The initial setup was straightforward. Deployment takes about one hour.

I implemented the solution myself.

We are using the free version. It's free of charge for one developer.

In terms of advice to others, I would suggest that they make sure they keep the system stable and to not add complexity.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

What is really helpful about the Azure SQL is that when we have a problem with a query, we can trade information about what indexes we should create on tables. It's really helpful for admin and for developers.

I need something which is in one place so I can automate the Azure data factory, but it's a different tool. It's not easy and in one place, so I can't switch to the other tool and do something there, automate everything there in the on-prem infrastructure, and then have everything in the agent. I can just pick one packet and use it. However, I want to be able to click it and run it. 

We could definitely use something which can automate the work. For example, I know there are a lot of tips like what indexes you should use, or what security features you should look at with your current SQL server. The acquired performance is assured, so some more statistics about acquired performance would be really valuable for the developer and also the administrators who use it. That would be really valuable, but we also need something which automates the work in particular SQL agents. I'm disappointed that it is not in the simple plan and I have to buy a higher plan.

I didn't notice any problems with the performance of this product. It's pretty stable. Computing is working as it should, so it's really good. It's stable, and the performance is really very good. That's what I really like about Azure SQL.

It's very scalable. That's why we like cloud solutions. You just add on every time you need some more performance pages. I just change the plan and it works.

To be honest I have never had a problem that called for technical support. I never had a chance to contact support because it works without any problems. It's the same thing with clients because we work very closely with our customers. Every time they have some problems we get a call from them and can solve the problem for them.

The initial implementation is straightforward. There are a few click-throughs and you have ready to use infrastructure. It usually takes five to ten minutes. Even less.

We use a few different versions. It depends on the project. We use the S-1, 2, and 3, depending on the customer's requirements.

If we compare, for example, the cloud infrastructure and on-prem infrastructure, there are lots of good things about cloud infrastructure because we can scale the product so that every single time when we need more performance, more computing, more storage we can just reach to the higher plan, and we can use it. There is obviously cost reduction because although we still need an on-prem trader for SQL parts, it's not hard like it was in SQL brand because we also had to care about the infrastructure too. Right now, we are concentrating on the software which is good and saves us money. 

I would rate this solution nine out of ten because it offers a lot, including statistics and other things which are very hard to get from Azure. However, you have to specify what you actually would like to monitor, which is not straightforward.

• Memory-optimized tables
• Elastic scale
• Azure portal management tools

Some customers' applications require very large tables (large number of records). Here are examples of how this solution helped them:

• Performance of memory-optimized tables in SQL Azure exceeds that of an on premise SQL Server
• Microsoft adds new features, including bug fixing, to SQL Azure every fortnight on the average.
• Performance benchmark: There is a benchmark suite that is relevant, Azure SQL Database Benchmark (ASDB). This benchmark includes metrics in plans for the three-service tiers, Basic, Standard and Premium. (In-Memory OLTP support is only available in Premium tier plans.)

The main reason for the business case of using SQL Azure for a few large tables for our customer was as follows:

• Most of the tables in the data model (DM) for the application are small enough to have required performance in a Standard Edition of an on premise SQL Server instance. Only four tables are large enough and have peaks of concurrent transactions per minute that are large enough to require in-memory OLTP support.
• We needed to compare TCO for an Enterprise on premise SQL Server instance for the entire DM (that would be mainly under-utilized) versus TCO of a Standard on-premises for most of the DM + TCO of SQL Database with in-memory OLTP support for these four tables. (TCO for this scenario includes an estimate of changes in the design of the application.)
• This TCO comparison was calculated for a period of two years. That is the time between a given version of on premise SQL Server and the next version.
• The end result was a lower TCO for the second scenario. The first scenario implies paying an Enterprise instance up-front at the start of the two year period.
• In the second scenario, the application would have two data repositories. Transactional control for the app is the reason why I mentioned the limitation of the SQL database. It only supports distributed transactions between instances of SQL Azure. That was a technical problem to solve. This was one of the main reasons for the changes in the app in the second scenario.
• We had to make some changes to the app to separate transactions and their contexts for the two repositories.
• In this case, it would be an improvement if Microsoft were to provide support of distributed transactions between SQL Azure instances. We would also like to see support for other kinds of services for Microsoft and other vendors who support standard distributed transactions.

SQL Azure only supports distributed transactions with other instances of SQL Azure. This has been an obstacle for us.

I have been using this product for almost four years.

You can deploy your solution to a SQL Azure database directly from SQL Server Management Studio (the same tool used to manage solutions for On Premises SQL Server editions), so, the transition from SQL Server On Prem deployment to SQL Azure deploy presents no issues.

There have been no issues with stability.

There have been no issues with scalability. This is a strong feature of the product.

Microsoft has very good customer service, both free and paid customer service (by free customer service I mean customer service on free cloud solutions like Outlook.com)

Microsoft has very good technical support for this service and product, as usual. Regarding SQL Azure, the amount of free online resources for developers is huge and relevant.

For some customers' applications, we switched from memory optimized tables with on premise instances to SQL Azure instances. The switch happened under the same SQL Server umbrella.

It takes some time to get accustomed to the Azure portal and to navigate through its tools and options. You can also connect directly from the SQL Server Management Studio. It is fairly easy to configure the proper parameters for connection. Once you are connected, it is transparent for any experienced SQL Server DBA or SQL developer.

Even if you are an experienced SQL Server DBA, there is some learning to do to be able to develop, deploy and manage SQL Azure solutions. At Microsoft Virtual Academy there is a set of free courses to learn all this.

You can use a free SQL Azure account to do some of the required practice while learning (bear in mind that the free account for all Azure tools, including SQL Azure, requires that you provide credit card information), but you will also need to license a SQL Azure plan for actual deployment and use of the solution: Basic plans, Standard Plans, Premium Plans.

You can choose a plan according to the amount of resources used by your solution (storage required, number of transactions, etc.), such that the hourly rate of the chosen plan is tied to the range of resources used.

The main setup cost that we have experienced is basically time required to do the training, and payment of a plan during the development and testing of the solution.

I did not evaluate anything else. I started using SQL Azure through teaching some MOC courses that included it, in early 2013. I had the chance to get to really know the product and the service.

For any potential customer who is considering migrating an app to SQL Azure, my advice is:

• Spend enough time analyzing if SQL Azure offers you a viable business case for the said app. It may or may not offer this to you!
• It is very important that you have a thorough understanding of the performance details and issues of the current app from a standpoint of the database engine. This is mainly with DMVs and DMFs, if you are using an on premise SQL Server.