We performed a comparison between Amazon RDS and SQL Azure based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, SQL Azure nudges slightly ahead of Amazon RDS. SQL Azure is part of the Microsoft Azure ecosystem and offers huge benefits to Microsoft / Microsoft Azure, users which represents tremendous cost savings, great security, and seamless integrations with most Microsoft products.
"The product is very, very easy to use."
"Encryption is the most valuable feature."
"It is very easy to set up initially."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon RDS is its performance."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten...Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"The solution’s scalability, usability, and availability are valuable to us."
"Amazon RDS is easy to manage, and it has customizable performance, high availability, and duality."
"For me, RDS is a great solution. I like that Amazon RDS is a very simple solution to implement and to start using."
"Its cost benefit is most valuable because you are charged per data unit instead of licensing. You can easily migrate your on-premise SQL to the cloud with a managed instance. That's what it is designed to do. It is easy to take your on-premise or older SQL instance and move it to the cloud. It makes it easy to get off your on-premise SQL and start utilizing the cost benefit of the cloud."
"It's user-friendly. Compared to other solutions, it's based more on clicks, not on scripts. It's easy to manage."
"We don't have to manage it much. It is managed by Microsoft, which makes it easy for us because there is no admin overhead for managing the servers. It is also easily scalable. During peak hours, it can scale higher."
"The automated scalability feature of SQL Azure has proven to be highly beneficial, particularly when deployed in the cloud."
"SQL Azure can integrate well with other Microsoft Windows services."
"The solution is efficient and easy to use."
"We like the ease of integrating it with our on-premises environment. We use a hybrid model. We have a SQL Server on-premises, and we have an integration with the cloud version. We do CPU or disk intensive processes on-premises. For accessibility, we offload onto the cloud. When you do a lot of IO and things like that in the cloud, Microsoft charges for the CPU activity."
"The initial setup was straightforward. Deployment takes about one hour."
"The solution's version upgrade and performance could be improved."
"The solution is a bit expensive."
"It would be helpful if they made it easier to migrate from an existing on-premises solution to the cloud-based service."
"There are a few aspects of database management that have room for improvement. There are a few parameters in the solution that are a bit unclear at our end as it's not understandable."
"With my limited experience, I have noticed that documentation management could be improved. It could be better."
"AWS support is decent, but it's not as good as before. Sometimes, we get junior staff who are unable to answer our questions. It also depends on the support team you get. Support based in Europe and Australia is better than US support. For example, European support is quick to deliver the right answer. US support handles routine maintenance issues, and it's mostly junior staff who don't know the product well."
"They should add a feature for manual SQL patching in RDS."
"The security features could be improved."
"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."
"There could be more collaboration with other tools like Data Factory and Databricks."
"The default 1433 port for communication should be customizable because most hacks or attacks are attempted when creating any application or database on the default port."
"Azure SQL can improve by adding more machine learning features like other databases, such as Cassandra or Cosmos DB."
"The management is entirely controlled by Microsoft, so there are some restrictions."
"One of the nice features in Microsoft SQL Server is the SQL Server CLR, which we sometimes need to use to protect our procedures using C# or CLR. This is not available in the SQL Azure database."
"The pricing is very high."
"The product could be more competitive in terms of features, security, and scalability."
Amazon RDS is ranked 1st in Database as a Service with 45 reviews while SQL Azure is ranked 2nd in Database as a Service with 90 reviews. Amazon RDS is rated 8.4, while SQL Azure is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Amazon RDS writes "Provides excellent authentication, authorization, integration, data protection, and autoscaling features". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SQL Azure writes "The SQL connector effectively syncs data to databases". Amazon RDS is most compared with Google Cloud SQL, MongoDB Atlas, Oracle Database as a Service, Google Cloud Spanner and Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer, whereas SQL Azure is most compared with Google Cloud SQL, MongoDB Atlas, Oracle Database as a Service, Google Cloud Spanner and IBM Db2 on Cloud. See our Amazon RDS vs. SQL Azure report.
See our list of best Database as a Service vendors.
We monitor all Database as a Service reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
