Amazon Aurora and SQL Server are leading database solutions competing in the cloud and enterprise environments. Aurora seems to have the upper hand with its cloud-native features that offer scalability and reduced operational overhead, advantageous for dynamic business needs.
Features: Amazon Aurora provides auto-scaling, seamless AWS integration, and high availability, making it a strong contender in cloud environments. It supports easy scaling and management of large-scale databases through integrated AWS services. SQL Server offers robust resource allocation and visualization tools like Graphical Query Analyzer, along with rich service offerings, including Analysis and Reporting Services, catering to comprehensive data management needs.
Room for Improvement: SQL Server faces challenges with installation complexity in non-Windows environments and high costs for additional features. It requires better platform integration and enhancements in high availability. Amazon Aurora, though advanced, lacks comprehensive database comparison and tuning tools, and calls for more tutorials. Its pricing and cryptographic capabilities also need improvement, highlighting areas for both platforms to innovate.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SQL Server offers flexible deployment options across On-premises, Hybrid, and Public Cloud settings but requires expert guidance due to setup complexity. Its customer service is generally good but can be inconsistent from Microsoft. Amazon Aurora is simpler to deploy in Public and Private Cloud settings, benefiting from smooth AWS integration. Aurora provides robust customer support with fast and efficient service, surpassing SQL Server in consistency and reliability.
Pricing and ROI: SQL Server's pricing is perceived as high, especially for the Enterprise edition, though users find value in its bundled features. ROI is experienced over time mainly due to high initial costs. Amazon Aurora offers flexible, usage-based pricing models, providing cost efficiency and easy management of fluctuating business demands. This approach, coupled with minimal licensing requirements, delivers better ROI for dynamic businesses compared to SQL Server's rigid cost structure.
Using Amazon Aurora has saved us significantly in terms of manpower costs, with nearly fifty percent savings compared to an on-premises solution.
SQL Server is the most cost-effective with good human resource availability to manage it.
All applications need our repository to provide services for our online business or our customers, so the return is good.
With Standard edition, they have saved a ton of money and they are really happy about that.
Technical support from Amazon is rated very highly.
The initial support could improve by having engineers familiarize themselves with the issue content to provide more specialized assistance from the start.
I give their technical support a rating of ten out of ten.
There was a time when Microsoft support provided very crisp answers, but over time, they have diluted their support to third parties, leading to a drop in support quality.
When we created support tickets, the experience was very positive.
This scalability is critical as it allows for runtime expansion, which is essential for businesses moving from on-premises to the cloud.
The server where we installed it has grown from 64 gigabytes in RAM to 256 gigabytes, demonstrating significant scalability capabilities.
Most of the time, they simply add another node in the availability group.
I can scale both horizontally and vertically without challenges.
It offers a stable environment, ensuring consistent performance.
There was an issue with memory-optimized tables, but it was resolved in 2025, allowing you to remove that file group, which was not possible before.
All applications supporting SQL Server in my experience work very well across various industries including telecom, finance, banking, ad, entertainment, and workforce management.
There are technical challenges, such as the inability to provision the database using a PostgreSQL snapshot directly.
Keeping extensions up-to-date with PostgreSQL releases would enhance Aurora's functionality.
I used the backup options in Amazon Aurora for cloning databases. It's very common.
It is fine to do a first release that works, but you cannot simply abandon it in the following years without service packs and improvements.
I would appreciate using Microsoft Pro as it can integrate with Excel or, with a simple query, consume information from the database using Microsoft Excel.
When we consider the price for replication in another site, the pricing becomes prohibitive.
The pricing is reasonable and not overly expensive.
Amazon Aurora is not very expensive as other solutions with similar features from other vendors come at almost the same cost.
The pricing for Amazon Aurora is different from DocumentDB because DocumentDB is cheaper.
Cost savings on human resources for Windows plus SQL Server versus other solutions.
Amazon Aurora offers a 99.9% SLA compared to PostgreSQL. This ensures a high level of availability for our applications.
It replicates data across multiple Availability Zones, ensuring high availability and geographical redundancy, which can be considered a GR instead of a DR.
Always On HADR functionality is one of the features that I use on a daily basis and one of my most used features, saving me lots of time, especially since previously I had to build a SQL cluster and Windows clusters that had many dependencies on shared infrastructure, but now with Always On, it is too stable with easy management and almost zero maintenance, which SQL Server handles itself.
I have been working with SQL Server for a long time, and it works well for me as I am using it in different applications, such as web applications, Windows applications, or the data warehouse reporting.
The best features of SQL Server are availability and stability.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| SQL Server | 12.1% |
| Amazon Aurora | 3.0% |
| Other | 84.9% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 4 |
| Large Enterprise | 13 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 119 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 59 |
| Large Enterprise | 115 |
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.
Amazon Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. It provides the security, availability, and reliability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost. Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which automates time-consuming administration tasks like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
Amazon Aurora features a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales up to 64TB per database instance. It delivers high performance and availability with up to 15 low-latency read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across three Availability Zones (AZs).
Visit the Amazon RDS Management Console to create your first Aurora database instance and start migrating your MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.
SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) by Microsoft. The product's main purposes are to store data and retrieve it as requested by other software applications - on the same computer or on another computer across a shared network. The solution is built on top of Structured Query Language (SQL), which is a standardized programming language used for relational database management.
The product is tied to Transact-SQL (T-SQL), which is an implementation of SQL from Microsoft that adds several proprietary programming extensions to the standard language. SQL Server is built similarly to other RDBMS products, as its structure is a row-based table that connects related data elements in different tables to one another. One of its most important components is the SQL Server Database Engine, as it controls data processing, storage, and security. Beneath the Database Engine is the SQL Server Operating System, which is used for memory and I/O management, locking data to avoid unneeded upgrades, and job scheduling.
The solution has four editions with different sets of services and tools. They include:
The first two are available for free and are typically utilized by smaller companies, as they work with fewer functions and storage. The second two editions are generally used by bigger organizations and enterprises and offer more features.
The solution has several functions through which users can facilitate different data-related processes. These include:
SQL Server Services
SQL Server has a wide range of add-on services that provide additional benefits beyond database management. These services include:
SQL Server Benefits
The solution has many benefits for users. These include the following:
Reviews from Real Users
A president at a consultancy evaluates SQL Server as a veteran solution with critical log shipping feature.
Harkamal S., a user at a manufacturing company, rates SQL Server with a high mark because it is a stable, scalable, and easy-to-deploy solution that pretty much covers everything.
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