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Azure SQL Database

Azure SQL Database

Overview

What is Azure SQL Database?

Azure SQL Database is Microsoft's relational database as a service (DBaaS).

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Recent Reviews
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 6 features
  • Database scalability (27)
    10.0
    100%
  • Automated backups (27)
    9.9
    99%
  • Database security provisions (27)
    9.0
    90%
  • Monitoring and metrics (26)
    9.0
    90%
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Pricing

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2 vCORE

$0.5044

Cloud
Per Hour

6 vCORE

$1.5131

Cloud
Per Hour

10 vCORE

$2.52

Cloud
Per Hour

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

How to connect to Azure SQL Database from Azure Data Studio | Data Exposed

YouTube

What is Azure SQL Database Hyperscale?

YouTube
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Features

Database-as-a-Service

Database as a Service (DBaaS) software, sometimes referred to as cloud database software, is the delivery of database services ocer the Internet as a service

9.2
Avg 8.7
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Product Details

What is Azure SQL Database?

Azure SQL Database Integrations

Azure SQL Database Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Azure SQL Database is Microsoft's relational database as a service (DBaaS).

Reviewers rate Database scalability highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Azure SQL Database are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(274)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 27)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Handling the software updates so we don't have to.
  • Handling the availability so we don't have to.
  • There are limits to the size of the database that I'd like to see go away.
  • We don't have access to the server level counters that I miss but understand why we cannot get them.
Scott Kennedy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Azure SQL Database does a really nice job connection to the Power BI business intelligence service without the need for a data gateway for report refreshes.
  • Azure SQL Database has a very easy upgrade path from a database to a data warehouse.
  • Azure SQL Database has a simple billing structure.
  • The Azure platform can be a little confusing sometimes with all the different options. Such is the Microsoft way.
  • If you forget to put rate limits on your jobs, it's possible that your cost could explode.
  • Learning the new Azure data tools to replace SSIS takes a while.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Scalability
  • Simplicity, ability to just focus on SQL, no need to manage anything else.
  • High speed and minimal down time.
  • Keeping data in the country you want.
  • In the traditional on-premise Microsoft SQL Database structure, while everything the database developer does is almost the same in Azure, the database administrator needs to be separated from the interfaces they are used to.
  • Job and Task manager work in different logic.
  • The maintenance structure is different, if only it could stay the way we are used to.
Niloofar Keshvari Nia | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • With managed SQL in the cloud, you can build applications tailored to your business needs.
  • Rapidly adaptable server less cloud computing and hyper-scale storage.
  • Define smart plans to determine the price according to the needs and type of each business so that startups and small companies can benefit from it better.
  • Develop more user-friendly UI wizard for migration SQL server
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
  • On premise SQL database is much easier to manage with the "SQL server management studio." Especially adding users and roles is a bit of a hassle with Azure SQL Database. You can of course manage within "SQL server management studio," but is slow and does not have all options at your disposal.
  • I find it rather expensive up to a point where I can't "sell" my recommendation to use SQL Database to the management department. The simplest implementation (not for productional use) is already 380 dollar per month. When you have an existing on premise SQL Database environment, it's very hard to convince anyone to use the cloud option.
  • I find the management capabilities in the cloud rather disappointing. I would like a cloud version of SQL Server management studio, instead of using CLI or powershell for everything. The on premise SQL server management studio is too slow and lack functionality when it comes to SQL database integration.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • An excellent option for cloud-based database hosting
  • Great if you already have on-premises SQL Databases that you want to migrate to the cloud
  • Cost-effective solution for cloud DB hosting with great scaling capabilities
  • Although it's a great option for migrating on-premises SQL DBs, it lacks some of the features of the on-premises SQL Server Instances
  • Server Collation is limited to SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
  • Logs support only [the] Full Recovery Model, which doesn't scale well for databases that contain logs/audit trail, or databases that contain engine jobs such as HangFire DBs
  • Doesn't Support CLR, so certain on-premises databases with CLR are not compatible, so you are most likely left with the AzureSQL Managed Instance for this functionality
Rishabh Khanna | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • It is fully managed and secure SQL database.
  • It is highly available and scalable.
  • It provides automatic backup and restore.
  • Documentation of Azure SQL is perfect with all best practices.
  • I would love to see some new sizes of databases for compute and storage.
  • prices related to different size can be improved.
  • performance can be improved to reduce the latency.
Ä°hsan Akkarpuz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Easy implementation thanks to the team working on the product launch.
  • Set up features available are flawless.
  • Very well suited to our needs. We are a company with more than 3k+ white collar employees.
  • Data management and transfer is so secure, we feel there is no possibility for information theft from external sources.
  • There might be room for improvement in visual interface. Some of my colleagues complain about basic operations could be carried out more easily, like administering other users.
  • Set-up speed could be faster - currently it took around 10 min.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • It's extremely agile in that you can add/reduce resources as necessary for your organizations needs with minimal down time or cost.
  • Zero need for on site software or servers to manage.
  • ETL processing is vastly improved running through the cloud.
  • Could perform better in accessing large data volumes.
  • Due to varying price structures, evaluation for your specific needs can be cumbersome.
  • Better system for notification/logging of DB errors.
Arthur Zubarev | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Scalability is #1: if it used to be an almost no-win endeavour to try to modernize your server or migrate to other hardware, with Azure SQL Database it becomes a press of a button.
  • All the tools simply work after you are on Azure SQL Database.
  • The applications do not need changes in order to start using Azure SQL Database.
  • Hybrid Cloud scenarios will work.
  • Clustering and failover - already there.
  • You can start monitoring the use and extract performance insights in a new way in Azure.
  • 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).
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Control of access and security is easy to manage and share within our team. Response is quick and quite a bit of things are preloaded to help.
  • Having the SQL component reside directly within our subscription makes connecting and managing very easy and highly transparent. Added spots for notes on things like why an IP is whitelisted is very helpful when working with a large team that includes off-shore components.
  • Scalability is another bonus, easy to scale up or down during peak times, and even automate that function makes it almost competitive with something like Snowflake.
  • A little slow on processing complex or large Views. We use a lot of Views to feed our BI system, and the processing time could see some improvement, IMHO.
  • Additional monitoring components would be nice too, automating some built in performance measurement tools would be a nice feature.
  • Price can always be improved as well. It’s not bad, but room for improvement.
Jacob Biguvu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Azure SQL database is low-cost option for development and production workloads.
  • Azure is a fully-managed SQL database. This falls into the industry category of PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) and DBaaS (Database-as-a-Service) where the software and hardware that is hosted, maintenance is owned by Microsoft. This allows users to concentrate fully on database management and administration.
  • Azure SQL database offers a variety of deployment options such as you can have a single database with its own set of resources managed via a SQL database server. A single database is similar to a contained database in SQL Server. Other options to leverage are an elastic pool and managed instances.
  • Azure provided a deployment option with a feature "elastic pool" - where you can have a collection of databases with a shared set of resources managed via SQL database server. Easily the resources from the pool can be managed among the databases. This brings more performance and cost effective when the user want to manage the multi-tenant applications.
  • Azure provided another deployment option that is "SQL database managed instances" with absence of certain features comparing to the single SQL database.
  • In AWS, we have RDS concept - where servers are invisible and have only database access. The same concept can be seen in Azure but we don't need to see the servers. When Azure SQL Database is DBaaS and PaaS, no need to have access to the SQL Server of the database.
  • It would be great to provide administration related procedures or functions to analyze the performance and maintenance tasks.
Michael Jipping | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Extremely Flexible- You have the ability to increase and decrease the performance resources as needed without taking a downtime or other burden.
  • Connectivity- Connection to your SQL Database is easily accomplished with SSMS or PowerShell.
  • Speed- Azure SQL Databases are quickly set up. You can have access and begin using your database within minutes.
  • It would be appreciated for better integration between SSMS and Azure Database service. Example, you need to a provision user account with the Azure portal. It would be great to be able to do this within SSMS.
  • Being able to run a back from SSMS versus from within the Azure Portal would be great. (Ability to create a standard .bak database backup).
December 21, 2018

Azure Sql rocks

Atul Gupta | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Agility of the platform
  • No infrastructure maintenance and worry about upgrading, it's managed.
  • Always on and universal availabilities
  • No worry about backup recovery
  • PowerBI connectors need improvement across 365 platform
  • Data bricks can be inherent feature
  • More robust integration to flow
Duncan Hernandez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • No more internal servers is a big plus.
  • Transition was relatively easy since we came from another Microsoft database before.
  • Query running time has significantly improved
  • Some of our older SSIS packages and SQL server jobs needed to be upgraded before a transition to Azure.
Erik Ralston | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Providing a SQL Server instance at low entry-level cost and global high-availability
  • Elastic offerings so SaaS applications can cheaply have one-database-per-customer approach for high data segregation
  • Intelligence performance recommendations from both Azure and the SQL Server engine itself
  • Intelligent recommendations are not a silver bullet, since they often fail to detect opportunities that are obvious to a human database admin with any experience.
  • Certain advanced database features - most recently I found: column store indices - are locked behind pricing tiers that one would naively assume are just about performance.
August 10, 2018

Intro to Azure SQL DB

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • High availability
  • Security features
  • Ease of upgrade from on premise SQL
  • Lacks full feature parity with SQL server
  • More limited access to metrics for performance troubleshooting
  • Hard to understand metrics used for sizing
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • It optimizes cost - pay per usage. It can scale up and down as needed.
  • It can be migrated to from Oracle, MySQL and other on premises databases.
  • It is always updated with management and administrative functionalities being added weekly.
  • Migration from on premises databases can be painful at first - but after couple of migrations it becomes easy.
  • Network capabilities and restrictions should be carefully evaluated.
  • It can be costly if you don't implement scale up/down automations.
Rick Hahn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • The fact that it is available for the Azure cloud platform.
  • The fact that it is easy to license as a monthly subscription and software access is simple.
  • The fact that it functions exactly as its local server based counter part.
  • It appears to have a slight delay in revealing data in the client software, then data will appear almost instantly. It is an odd feel when using it until you get used to it.
  • It seems a bit slower than its local server based counter part.
  • The tool bars icons are a little different and took some getting used to.
Simranjeet Singh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • It is best to store large scale data. We can connect with it in any language.
  • Interface is very easy and the debugging feature is really effective at discovering real errors.
  • Speed of processing large files and store into database is very fast. Data export and import is very safe and simple.
  • Login security features protect against unauthorized users.
  • Overall it is the best tool to mange large and complex data, but it needs enhancements in the speed of accessing large data volumes.
  • Sometimes it get hung if we forcefully stop the select query.
  • It should show consistent performance through SQL profiler tool.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Scales easily
  • Performance is solid
  • It just works
  • Elastic pools are great
  • It would nice to have Azure SQL Database provide closer to full support of T-SQL
  • Cross database queries
  • More performance reports would be nice
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • The great thing about is even you are a pro or a newbie with Azure, you will not be tired of setting up SQL Server, the befitting pipelining of AZURE to cloud service where you don't need it onsite.
  • You always don't need to update services, patches and deployment of supporting services. Cloud does make it someone else's job to do this.
  • Generally obviates the need for building high availability architectures; Azure databases built within it are automatically highly available.
  • Highly scalable and has vast support for non Microsoft technologies.
  • One of the ways SQL Azure manifests being part of the whole stack is by offering multiple levels of implementation. If you simply need a website and a database, you can hitch an SQL Azure instance to an Azure website and be done with it.
  • No schedulers available in case you require cron jobs.
  • Certain username are not allowed (root, admin, administrator).
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