Amazon Redshift vs. Azure SQL Database

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Redshift
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse solution, from Amazon Web Services.
$0.24
per GB per month
Azure SQL Database
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Azure SQL Database is Microsoft's relational database as a service (DBaaS).
$0.50
Per Hour
Pricing
Amazon RedshiftAzure SQL Database
Editions & Modules
Redshift Managed Storage
$0.24
per GB per month
Current Generation
$0.25 - $13.04
per hour
Previous Generation
$0.25 - $4.08
per hour
Redshift Spectrum
$5.00
per terabyte of data scanned
2 vCORE
$0.5044
Per Hour
6 vCORE
$1.5131
Per Hour
10 vCORE
$2.52
Per Hour
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon RedshiftAzure SQL Database
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon RedshiftAzure SQL Database
Considered Both Products
Amazon Redshift
Chose Amazon Redshift
Azure SQL Database was discarded because of a less attractive licensing, costs, plus its integrates poorly with many of the Azure offerings as say Azure Data Factory - it is not a true ETL yet. Also, the rest of the tools used were of Open Source type and it did not look like a …
Chose Amazon Redshift
Redshift is better cost wise and also since the whole ecosystem is set in AWS, it is wise to use redshift
Chose Amazon Redshift
As our applications are hosted on AWS service, Redshift is the best option for us. Also, it provide a near to real-time performance on limited datasets and less complex queries. High availability is the major concern for any growing business and AWS is the best option for this. …
Azure SQL Database
Chose Azure SQL Database
I would say MySQL in either Aurora or MariaDB form come close however, Azure SQL Database has a more streamlined approach to delivering a consistent programmability model, supported drivers and feature set.
Azure SQL Database T-SQL is advantageous and more complete than SQL …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon RedshiftAzure SQL Database
Database-as-a-Service
Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Redshift
-
Ratings
Azure SQL Database
9.2
28 Ratings
5% above category average
Automatic software patching00 Ratings9.026 Ratings
Database scalability00 Ratings9.028 Ratings
Automated backups00 Ratings10.028 Ratings
Database security provisions00 Ratings9.028 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics00 Ratings8.027 Ratings
Automatic host deployment00 Ratings10.023 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon RedshiftAzure SQL Database
Small Businesses
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.7 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Snowflake
Snowflake
Score 8.8 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Snowflake
Snowflake
Score 8.8 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon RedshiftAzure SQL Database
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(38 ratings)
8.0
(28 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(10 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(7 ratings)
9.0
(5 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon RedshiftAzure SQL Database
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
If the number of connections is expected to be low, but the amounts of data are large or projected to grow it is a good solutions especially if there is previous exposure to PostgreSQL. Speaking of Postgres, Redshift is based on several versions old releases of PostgreSQL so the developers would not be able to take advantage of some of the newer SQL language features. The queries need some fine-tuning still, indexing is not provided, but playing with sorting keys becomes necessary. Lastly, there is no notion of the Primary Key in Redshift so the business must be prepared to explain why duplication occurred (must be vigilant for)
Read full review
Microsoft
Your upcoming app can be built faster on a fully managed SQL database and can be moved into Azure with a few to no application code changes. Flexible and responsive server less computing and Hyperscale storage can cope with your changing requirements and one of the main benefits is the reduction in costs, which is noticeable.
Read full review
Pros
Amazon AWS
  • [Amazon] Redshift has Distribution Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables, it improves Query performance. For instance, we can define Mapping/Meta-data tables with Distribution-All Key, so that it gets replicated across all the nodes, for fast joins and fast query results.
  • [Amazon] Redshift has Sort Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables along with above Distribution Keys, it further improves your Query performance. It also has Composite Sort Keys and Interleaved Sort Keys, to support various use cases
  • [Amazon] Redshift is forked out of PostgreSQL DB, and then AWS added "MPP" (Massively Parallel Processing) and "Column Oriented" concepts to it, to make it a powerful data store.
  • [Amazon] Redshift has "Analyze" operation that could be performed on tables, which will update the stats of the table in leader node. This is sort of a ledger about which data is stored in which node and which partition with in a node. Up to date stats improves Query performance.
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Microsoft
  • Maintenance is always an issue, so using a cloud solution saves a lot of trouble.
  • On premise solutions always suffer from fragmented implementations here and there, where several "dba's" keep track of security and maintenance. With a cloud database it's much easier to keep a central overview.
  • Security options in SQL database are next level... data masking, hiding sensitive data where always neglected on premise, whereas you'll get this automatically in the cloud.
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • We've experienced some problems with hanging queries on Redshift Spectrum/external tables. We've had to roll back to and old version of Redshift while we wait for AWS to provide a patch.
  • Redshift's dialect is most similar to that of PostgreSQL 8. It lacks many modern features and data types.
  • Constraints are not enforced. We must rely on other means to verify the integrity of transformed tables.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • One needs to be aware that some T-SQL features are simply not available.
  • The programmatic access to server, trace flags, hardware from within Azure SQL Database is taken away (for a good reason).
  • No SQL Agent so your jobs need to be orchestrated differently.
  • The maximum concurrent logins maybe an unexpected problem.
  • Sudden disconnects.
  • The developers and admin must study the capacity and tier usage limits https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-subscription-service-limits otherwise some errors or even transaction aborts never seen before can occur.
  • Only one Latin Collation choice.
  • There is no way to debug T-SQL ( a big drawback in my point of view).
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Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
This is best solution as a DBA one could expect from a service provider and as a cloud service, it removes all your hassles.
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
Just very happy with the product, it fits our needs perfectly. Amazon pioneered the cloud and we have had a positive experience using RedShift. Really cool to be able to see your data housed and to be able to query and perform administrative tasks with ease.
Read full review
Microsoft
It just works!
Read full review
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
The support was great and helped us in a timely fashion. We did use a lot of online forums as well, but the official documentation was an ongoing one, and it did take more time for us to look through it. We would have probably chosen a competitor product had it not been for the great support
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Microsoft
We give the support a high rating simply because every time we've had issues or questions, representatives were in contact with us quickly. Without fail, our issues/questions were handled in a timely matter. That kind of response is integral when client data integrity and availability is in question. There is also a wealth of documentation for resolving issues on your own.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Than Vertica: Redshift is cheaper and AWS integrated (which was a plus because the whole company was on AWS).
Than BigQuery: Redshift has a standard SQL interface, though recently I heard good things about BigQuery and would try it out again.
Than Hive: Hive is great if you are in the PB+ range, but latencies tend to be much slower than Redshift and it is not suited for ad-hoc applications.
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Microsoft
We moved away from Oracle and NoSQL because we had been so reliant on them for the last 25 years, the pricing was too much and we were looking for a way to cut the cord. Snowflake is just too up in the air, feels like it is soon to be just another line item to add to your Azure subscription. Azure was just priced right, easy to migrate to and plenty of resources to hire to support/maintain it. Very easy to learn, too.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Amazon AWS
Redshift is relatively cheaper tool but since the pricing is dynamic, there is always a risk of exceeding the cost. Since most of our team is using it as self serve and there is no continuous tracking by a dedicated team, it really needs time & effort on analyst's side to know how much it is going to cost.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Our company is moving to the AWS infrastructure, and in this context moving the warehouse environments to Redshift sounds logical regardless of the cost.
  • Development organizations have to operate in the Dev/Ops mode where they build and support their apps at the same time.
  • Hard to estimate the overall ROI of moving to Redshift from my position. However, running Redshift seems to be inexpensive compared to all the licensing and hardware costs we had on our RDBMS platform before Redshift.
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Microsoft
  • Perfect for small and medium databases, being very cost effective.
  • As a Platform as a Service, there is no concern about patches, upgrades and end of life.
  • Be aware of security and network capabilities. The service cannot run in the VNET as Azure Virtual Machines do.
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ScreenShots