Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Microsoft Azure SQL Database (formerly SQL Azure, SQL Server Data Services, SQL Services, Windows Azure SQL Database) is a managed cloud database for app developers that makes building and maintaining applications easier and more productive.

A cloud database is a database that runs on a cloud computing platform, and access to it is provided as a service. Managed database services take care of scalability, backup, and high availability of the database. Azure SQL Database is a managed database service which is different from AWS RDS which is a container service.

Microsoft Azure SQL Database includes built-in intelligence that learns app patterns and adapts to maximize performance, reliability, and data protection.

It was originally announced in 2009 and released in 2010.

Key capabilities include:

· Continuous learning of your unique app patterns, adaptive performance tuning, and automatic improvements to reliability and data protection

· Scaling as needed, with virtually no app downtime

· Management and monitoring of multitenant apps with isolation benefits of one-customer-per-database

· Leverage open source tools like cheetah, sql-cli, VS Code and Microsoft tools like Visual Studio and SQL Server Management Studio, Azure Management Portal, PowerShell, and REST APIs

· Data protection with encryption, authentication, limiting user access to the appropriate subset of the data, continuous monitoring and auditing to help detect potential threats and provide a record of critical events in case of a breach

Popular Use Cases

· Relational data storage for cloud based applications and web sites

· Business and consumer web and mobile apps

· Manage databases for multi-tenant apps (software-as-a-service)

· Quickly create dev and test databases to speed up development cycles

· Scale production business services quickly and at a known cost

· Containerize data in the cloud for isolation and security

· Outsource database management in order to focus on value-added services

Design

Azure SQL Database shares the SQL Server 2016 codebase. It is compatible with SQL Server 2014 and 2016 and most of the features available in SQL Server 2016 are available in Azure SQL Database. A list of incompatibilities is published by Microsoft.

Timeline

2009 – Service announced

2010 – Service went live

2014 – New version announced

2015 – Elastic Pools announced

Pricing

Azure SQL Database is offered either as a Standalone database or Elastic database pool, and is priced in three tiers: Basic, Standard and Premium. Each tier offers different performance levels to accommodate a variety of workloads.

The resources available for Standalone databases are expressed in terms of Database Transaction Units (DTUs) and for elastic pools in terms of elastic DTUs or eDTUs. A DTU is defined as a blended measure of CPU, memory, and data I/O and transaction log I/O in a ratio determined by an OLTP benchmark workload designed to be typical of real-world OLTP workloads.

SERVICE TIER	TARGET WORKLOADS
	Databases are available as Standalone databases or in database pools which allow multiple databases to share storage and compute resources.
Basic	Best suited for a small database, supporting typically one single active operation at a given time. Examples include databases used for development or testing, or small-scale infrequently used applications.
Standard	The go-to option for most cloud applications, supporting multiple concurrent queries. Examples include workgroup or web applications.
Premium	Designed for high transactional volume, supporting many concurrent users and requiring the highest level of business continuity capabilities. Examples are databases supporting mission critical applications.