Azure SQL database makes ease the transition to Cloud
July 01, 2019
Azure SQL database makes ease the transition to Cloud
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Azure SQL Database
CarMax is a car largest used-car retailer and a fortune company. I am Cloud Engineer/DBA in a team of DBA group. The company is largely using the SQL Server database as a back-end for most applications. The company decided to migrate their on-premises databases unto the cloud. They chose the Azure SQL database for all SQL databases. The main reason for the migration are the factors such as cost saving, scalability and performance, security, business continuity, and disaster recovery. On top of this, migration is very quick and simple from on-premises unto Azure, because Azure provided migration tools natively.
- 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.
- Cost saving is best for the company
- Sociability and performance gives better user experience.
- Business continuity and disaster recovery
Azure owned by Microsoft who owned SQL Server, so provided a variety of tools for easy migration/transition and from on-premises to the cloud; and management. I recommend using Azure for any on-prem SQL server databases.