Microsoft Azure SQL Database Reviews

We are deploying a few server-based applications, and we are using the Azure SQL database.

It provides good analytics. We can see which database is getting more requests, etc. We are able to see everything in Azure SQL. Its analytics are in a readable format, so a layman can understand them.

Its performance is good. It has a lot of features. It has the backup feature, which is not there in Amazon RDS. In Azure SQL, there is an option to replicate and restore a database point to point, whereas we can't do that with Amazon RDS.

It is also simpler and more powerful than Amazon RDS. It also has analytics, and it automatically suggests a few things. It has an in-built indexing function.

In terms of support, they don't give much support.

I have been using this solution for four to five years.

There are more than 12,000 people using this service. Its usage is going to increase day by day.

They don't give much support, but their tech support subscription cost is much lesser than AWS.

Its installation is very easy. We can easily move from one pool to another pool in Azure. It takes just one to two minutes.

We take care of it ourselves.

It only has a subscription-based license.

I would recommend this solution to others. I would rate it a ten out of ten.

We use it also for database management, as a database engine.

We use it for different projects - mainly when we have lots of data and the customer can't afford to pay the license for SQL Server, which is not cheap. That's the main reason we use MySQL or Postgres or other databases. 

The management and the remote access in SQL Azure are seamless.

The solution is extremely scalable.

We've found the stability to be quite good.

It's the type of product that doesn't need much technical support assistance as it works seamlessly.

Some data types are not available on SQL Azure while it's available on SQL Server. It's a little bit limited in terms of functionality. The difference is not huge. You can go back and forth between them. We used to do this all the time. However, it is something to note.

Maybe they need to add the data types that exist in SQL Server, not in SQL Azure. That would make it better.

The pricing can be high in certain countries as Microsoft doesn't adjust for regional pricing. 

The solution is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is good.

The product is on the cloud. It's very scalable for that reason. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.

Most of the time no one needs support on SQL products or services. That said, the support in Azure is amazing. We never encountered an issue that they didn't solve. This speaks to the quality of Azure.

We also use SQL Server. The main difference is SQL Server is a full-featured database engine, whereas MySQL is based on what we call a file-based database, which is similar to flat files as a database engine.

The recommendation of which to use is based on the use case. It depends on what use case the customer will need. If they don't have the capacity to manage their own server, I would recommend Azure, as it's managed. You don't have to worry about the management and administration.

The pricing is prevalent for everything Microsoft. The thing is, they don't allow different pricing for different regions. Some countries are price sensitive.

I'm an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

We use this solution to store data MODS that are going to be consumed by Power BI.

The solution is quire more stable than other tools.

I would like to the solutions scalability to be improved.

I have used this solution for the past three years.

This is a stable solution in general.

It is moderately scalable in my opinion. On-premise, you can definitely scale it up better, but it is a bit restricted on the cloud.

We used Oracle Databases and SQL Server databases on-premise.

The initial setup was easy for about five hundred users and it required just a couple of managers.

Our consultants helped with the implementation and the process took maybe ten minutes.

I would recommend this solution for those who are looking to integrate it. I would rate this an eight out of ten.

Our core business is to make mathematical models for production and solutions. We don't develop or use software. The data comes with the Excel format stored in SQL and we write complex queries about the data and run it in our models. Our data is not sensitive and it's a matter of having a server for storage. I'm a software engineer.

SQL Azure is efficient and very easy to use. The programming facility is very good and the solution is great at solving problems. 

SQL Azure could offer a lot more services and applications. I'd also like to see some tools that we could use on the SQL Server for data virtualization. That would be an improvement. 

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

We don't run critical data and haven't had any issues with the stability. 

We have a lot of experience and good programmers and IT administrators in the company, so we haven't needed customer support. 

Our implementation was straightforward and carried out internally. We have 10 users of this solution, the majority are in production and engineering, with a couple in software engineering. 

Our license is pay-as-you-go and we pay around €200 per month. You need to keep an eye on this because with scaling the cost can increase quite quickly. 

This solution is more expensive than some others, but not as expensive as Amazon, Google and Oracle, which all have a lot of extra costs involved. 

I recommend this solution and rate it 10 out of 10. 

I'm an end-user. I'm a business analyst, so I'm using SQL Azure to do analysis.

Emergency mode is quite useful.

I haven't explored SQL Azure's features much, but I would like to see some better integration with Python. 

I've been using SQL Azure for approximately two years.

SQL Azure is stable.

I think SQL Azure is scalable. Almost 200 people are using it in the commercial department.

I can't say much about Microsoft support because the IT people are the ones who deal with the Microsoft support team. Whenever we have an issue, we put our IT team on it and leave everything to them. They try to handle it if they can or they might bring in some consultants from the Microsoft team. 

I previously used Oracle, but I didn't spend much time with it, so I really can't say. I don't think Oracle has any capabilities that SQL Azure lacks, and it's not used in as many companies and institutions.

Setting up SQL Azure isn't complex.

I rate SQL Azure seven out of 10. 

It is basically hosting the backend of our application that we write as a software development company. We're moving our educational timetabling software, which was historically an on-premise installation, to a cloud-based service offering for customers.

It is pretty much version-less in the sense that we are using whatever is presented to us and available. We are purely using the cloud-based services from Azure hosted in the cloud, which obviously and technically is version-less to some degree. We are using SQL Azure, app services, Application Gateway, key vaults, and storage solutions within Azure. It is relatively simple but sufficient for our needs at the moment.

We predominantly don't use the GUI interface. We are using Terraform as our infrastructure and code provider to manage and maintain all of the Azure components that we are using. They're offering all the integration and providing it through the APIs.

We have come from hosting on-premise for customers, or they've done it themselves with SQL. We've now taken a cloud offering for the equivalent services of standard database management and the inbuilt backup and restore offerings. The scalability is probably the biggest feature that we are benefiting from by being in the cloud.

We haven't had any major issues that have prevented us from doing stuff fundamentally. For its implementation, sometimes, it is complicated to understand what your needs are. It would be good to have a few use cases that provide different cloud variations that match on-premise installations and show how they can be moved to the cloud a bit better.

Its pricing is complicated and can be improved. We need a better offering. Making it cheaper is always a good thing for us.

I have been using this solution for two years.

We haven't had any issues. It has been up and available and working when we needed it to. We haven't had any outages that we're aware of.

There are not many users at the moment because we're still in pre-production. We're sort of in beta testing at the moment.

It probably has 50 users currently. It is not a very large tool. We are planning to expand its usage as we build out our actual software ourselves, which we're still working on. We'll be making that available to customers, and we'll be offering that as a global opportunity for customers.

I have not been in touch with their technical support.

We were just using Microsoft on-premise SQL, and we've migrated to Azure in the cloud. It basically is like for like, as far as we're concerned.

It depends on which area you're coming from. If you're using the GUI, it's relatively simple. Understanding what your needs are sometimes is a bit more complicated. Understanding the availability of things like Elastic pools took us a little bit of time to get our heads around but, otherwise, it is pretty simple. They could provide some use cases for this.

It is hard to provide the deployment duration because it wasn't just Azure on its own that we were having to deal with. We were taking our on-premise product and converting it. Preparing the infrastructure and doing it via the likes of Terraform took us probably about three months overall, but that was more about getting up to speed on the tools to do it, as opposed to individual components such as SQL.

The pricing is actually complicated, and that is probably one downside of it. In some respects, although we can plan for the costs on a month-by-month basis, we are finding it hard to project our costings for it. 

Fundamentally, Microsoft is offering two pricing models, and it is challenging to understand the differences between the two. We're basically on the DTU model at the moment. That may change in the future as the size grows, but it is one of those things that we'll end up monitoring as we progress. 

At the moment, to get a reasonable response, generally, the price is a little high for us, but it is one of those things for which we know that we can do improvements on our code. So, it is not just the service that's the problem; it is some of the things that we need to do as well.

I would recommend it depending upon the use case. If you need an on-premise service, then you would choose the on-premise SQL, and if you need a cloud-based one, then I'd suggest SQL on the cloud. The scalability of SQL in the cloud is far simpler than the scalability of SQL on-premise. This is one benefit that the cloud edition has over the on-premise version that people could consider.

I would rate SQL Azure an eight out of 10.

SQL is basically a relation database, it can be used for any key-value related data models. Anything which is a table and column-based can be used. If you are an already existing SQL customer or a document tester worker, then I think it is common to go for SQL or Oracle. More present, you have Cosmos DB, it can be used as both SQL and NoSQL databases. This is the database that we are exploring today, and what we are using more.

The most valuable aspects of this solution are the integration with the darknet stack especially Microsoft, table groups, supports major capability requirements, and SQL always-on feature.

The solution could improve by supporting more operating systems.

In a future release, I would like to see more development on SQL servers on containers where you can manage a skill across multi-clouds.

I have been using this solution for four years.

We have more than 10,000 users using the solution in my organization. 

We use Oracle products running in parallel with this solution but for different parts of our business. There are at times different requirements needed but most of the Windows systems work with this solution.

The installation was easy. They have a tool to assist with the migration of your old database to SQL.

We have a database team which is approximately 200 people. They do the engineering, optics, development, and operations. 

There is a license required to use the solution and it cost $30 to do the installation.

I would recommend this solution and we plan to use it in the future.

I rate SQL Azure a nine out of ten.

We are using it for an application in two different models, the PaaS model and the SaaS model. One is the product, so we are using it as a SaaS model. We are using the other one simply as a PaaS model.

For its deployment, we are sort of using the highest model in which one instance has only VM and the SQL installer on it. Another instance is simply using SQL Azure.

We primarily and generally use it only for DB purposes. When it comes to the Azure part, we can easily provision, scale up, and scale down the generator machine. This kind of flexibility is the USP of SQL Azure.

Its interface and ease of use are also valuable. It is very easy to use and integrate with multiple databases. If I need to pull in or import some data from my on-premises database, the ease with which you can connect and pull the data, not only from SQL Server but also from other flavors of MySQL or even Oracle, is very good. 

The way it has been designed, in the on-premises deployments, the underlying Windows OS is highly scalable but has a very large resource requirement. A lot of power-related and memory-related things are there, which I have not seen in the RHEL and Oracle. I have not tried SQL on RHEL EXEC. On Windows, infrastructure-wise, a very large workload is running on the SQL. This issue is related to Windows, not SQL.

I have been using SQL Azure for two years. 

As of now, we have less production workload on Azure, but whatever is there, it is pretty stable. So, from a very large workload perspective, I can't comment, but till now, I have not found any issue. I will consider it quite stable as of now.

It is highly scalable.

My team initiates the service request. We have unified support from Microsoft. The service request is through the service hub. This is, in fact, a very good change from the point of view of the overall approach towards support. We can open multiple or unlimited numbers of service requests on the service hub, and their response is also quite good.

We started with just a simple client-server kind of application. Right now, we are basically in the full-phased data lake solution of Azure. So, it is in the design and architecture stages. When it is finalized, then we will implement a full-blown solution on Azure.

I would, of course, highly recommend this solution. You cannot avoid SQL Server or SQL Azure if you are primarily working in the database domain. There are a lot of other databases available in the market, but the ease with which you can do the development and the overall support that you get cannot be compared with any other database. 

I would rate SQL Azure a nine out of ten.

The most valuable feature of SQL Azure is the user-friendly VMs.

The solution’s visibility could be improved.

The solution's stability is good, and we haven't faced any issues so far.

I rate SQL Azure a nine out of ten for stability.

SQL Azure is a scalable solution. Around ten users are regularly using SQL Azure in our organization.

The solution’s initial setup is straightforward.

The solution’s deployment takes hardly a day.

Overall, I rate SQL Azure ten out of ten.

We use the solution as a customer database for travel desk applications.

The solution suits well for our server requirements. It doesn't require an extensive system to run. So, it is a fast, limited, and affordable database serving our business purpose.

They should include more accessible functions for image tooling. Presently, we are using optional features for it.

I have been using the solution for about two years.

The solution is moderately stable. I rate its stability an eight out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. We have around 200 solution users in our organization. I rate its scalability an eight out of ten.

The solution's technical support team is good.

Positive

Previously, I used Microsoft's on-premises version.

The solution's initial setup was straightforward. I rate the process an eight out of ten. It took one or two days to deploy it. Since it is cloud-based, we followed the standard Azure mechanism.

The solution is moderately expensive. I rate the pricing a six out of ten.

One should be clear about their reporting environment. For instance, Microsoft ecosystem reporting supports only Power BI. Secondly, one should ensure they utilize more customization options than already issued.

I rate the solution as eight. It is a familiar product for users who already work on Microsoft environments. If you need a limited cut-down version, it also has an option for a single database.