What is SQL Azure?

SQL Azure is Microsoft’s cloud database service. Based on SQL Server database technology and built on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud computing platform, SQL Azure enables organizations to store relational data in the cloud and quickly scale the size of their databases up or down as business needs change. Data is hosted, managed and provisioned in Microsoft data centers.

Organizations can build applications on-premises and move them to SQL Azure or build them on Windows Azure and keep the data in the cloud. SQL Azure supports SQL Server’s Transact-SQL (T-SQL) query language, offers built-in support for high availability and fault tolerance and allows for data to be synchronized between on-premises SQL Server and cloud databases.

Database analysts have pointed out a few important differences between SQL Azure and SQL Server. For example, SQL Azure doesn’t support all T-SQL commands, SQL Server data types like XML or functions such as cross-database joins, and the maximum database size currently is just 50 GB. The current release also does not perform scheduled backups and restores, though Microsoft has said this will be addressed in future releases.

What is Azure SQL Database

Azure SQL Database is a cloud-computing database service (Database as a Service), that is offered by Microsoft Azure Platform which helps to host and use a relational SQL database in the cloud without requiring any hardware or software installation. Also, it provides various advanced features to its users and some of them can be listed as the following;

• Long-term backup retention enables us to keep backups for up to 10 years
  

• Geo-replication provides to create readable secondary databases in different data center locations
  

• Automatic tuning is an autonomous artificial intelligence-based performance tuning option that fixes the performance problems automatically
  

• Business continuity
  

• Scaling database resources feature is the most powerful feature that provides scaling the database resources either up or down
  

• Automated backups
  

• High-availability

Top 5 Benefits of Microsoft Azure SQL Database

1) Scalability and Beyond

First of all, flexible service plans for SQL Database meet the needs of both big and small business users. SQL is no longer way out of reach for smaller operations because the pricing structure allows users to pay as little as $4.99 per database per month with a maximum storage set at 150 GB per database. That’s a lot of space for very little cost.

2) High Speed and Minimal Down Time

High availability architectures mean high speed connectivity and data retrieval as well as low down time at your organization. There’s nothing worse than stopping business because your technology can’t keep up, but that is no longer a problem with SQL Database.

Secondly, companies can add application instances as needed through sharding, for example. Sharding is a type of database partitioning that separates very large databases into smaller, faster, more easily managed parts called data shards. Not only can you spin nodes up and down on demand, you can leverage a federation infrastructure to scale more easily without affecting other areas of the server. SQL Azure Federation Data Migration Wizardcan even further automate this process, which impacts your organization and the employees much less.

Lastly, there are multiple levels of implementation that you can benefit from. If you just need a website and a database, you can hitch a SQL Azure instance to an Azure website and you’re done! If you need a full-blownvirtual machine(VM) now or even down the road, you can get that as well. You can even use a locally deployed instance of SQL Server in the VM instead of SQL Azure. These implementation options help make your company more adaptable to the inevitable changes it undergoes on a regular basis. With SQL Azure, you’re not stuck. You’re on a foundation that encourages growth while working with it!

3) Improved Usability

SQL developers are familiar with all things SQL and SQL Database can be updated with SQLCMD or the SQL Server Management Studio. Better yet, there’s no coding required! Using standard SQL, it’s much easier to manage database systems without having to write or update a huge amount of code.

4) Time Is On Your Side

With no administrative duties on your physical location, employees can take time for strategic work to advance and grow all-around business success. When your database is hosted in the cloud, you don’t have to deal with setting up SQL Server, apportioning databases, and dealing with physical machine maintenance and upkeep. All of this results in better alignment of your organization and ultimately more time on your side.

5) Easy-to-Use Migration Tools

Ramp up time with SQL Database is now easier than ever and free! SQL Data Sync allows you to either sync your SQL Server-stored data or migrate the data without having to worry about the costs to migrate by syncing gigabyte-sized tables.