What is SQLAzure (Azure SQL Database)

SQLAzure or Azure SQL Database is a database-as-a-service cloud based offering (Microsoft Azure); this offers a fully managed relational Database solution which is highly compatible with current tools to manage SQL Server. This also offers built-in high availability & scalability based on requirements. You don’t have to worry anymore about the infrastructure or the management of the same, just create a Database and start using its features – that means rapid development and at the same time it accelerates your time to market.

Let me walk you through couple of features\offerings which will help you understand it better:

SQLAzure DB is available in Basic, Standard and Premium tiers. Each tier offers its own level of performance and capabilities to support tiniest to highly transactional database workload. The amazing part is you can change service tiers as your database requirements grow that too without any downtime; isn’t it amazing! This makes more sense to those scenarios where you can predict the peak usage and off-peak usage and based on the demand you can turn the knobs and manage cost.

Let’s say you can’t predict the actual usage or the usage pattern is not defined & you don’t want to waste resources\increase cost by over-provisioning then don’t you worry Elastic database pools are there to help you out.

When it comes to performance measure you can very well do that in SQLAzure and the unit of measure is a Database Transaction Unit (DTU) which represents the relative power of database to complete a database transaction.

You get all of these things without compromising anything over security; yes like On-premise SQL Server SQLAzure provides solid database security from limiting access to protecting data at a granular level. This gives you peace of mind & you can put your most confidential data over SQLAzure without any doubt.

How can we forget to mention the SLA (Service level agreement) and uptime; like any other service vendor Microsoft provides SLA which describes its commitments for uptime and connectivity; Azure provides 99.9% availability for its Web/Business tiers and 99.99% availability SLA for Basic, standard and premium tiers; each service tier has its own set of Business continuity features to choose.

To know more about SQLAzure stay tuned!

Feel free to leave a comment. 🙂

Thanks,
Sarabpreet Singh Anand
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