SQL Azure Reviews

There is significant abstraction from beginner to intermediate database administration responsibilities. In this way, I can focus on my business objectives, as opposed to heavy upfront cost of ownership when compared to on-premises or IaaS alternatives.

It provides faster turnaround time to getting solutions customer facing.

It could have closer parity to on-premises capabilities. Introduce a graph database engine component.

I have been using Azure since its inception.

Historically, SQL Azure has tended to choke at databases larger than 50GB, and in some cases, as small as 20GB. Granted, this starts becoming a function of database design.

Caveat: It's been a while since I last attempted to put larger sets of data into a single SQL Azure database. Now, if you don't use resilient connection tolerance practices (or technologies), then it may feel unstable. Here again, it becomes a function of design.

In other words, if you simply choose to use on-premises traditional designs and principles when interacting with SQL Azure, then there is a higher probability of it "feeling" unstable.

I've seen and experienced some amazing service and then I've endured appalling interactions, too.

This becomes a function of your SQL engine skill, the diligence and appropriateness of your design, the support tier you purchased, and some luck if you connected with a support engineer who not only spoke your language, but also carried an attitude of chasing down a solution.

The setup is super straightforward. I don't really find that question useful, or at least as useful as, "What is it like incrementally adjusting the design of the database?"

This is where Microsoft's eco-system further outshines the alternatives. Again, this is a much longer discussion, but it's folly to choose a platform, and even a technology, without considering the lifecycle of changes.

In an agile world, you have to ask how you are going to get that data tier to respond efficiently and within business requirements and tolerances.

It's an elastic service, at least in its simplest definition, and a proactive one with some reactive capability. Therefore, there is value in monitoring usage and adjusting proactively to gain optimal savings.

Alternatives tended to be IaaS offerings hammered or butchered to be PaaS. So, frankly, the answer is that I don't know of other PaaS alternatives.

SQL Azure is a good option for maintaining structured data, especially for smaller databases (0 - 25GB).

My solutions today leverage a plethora of structured and unstructured data. Therefore, having this service in close proximity to the resource groups I use for the other services is beneficial.

It does tend to constrain me to the Azure platform, as I've yet to find a vendor who can give me the RDBMS PaaS offering. Constrain makes it sound like “suck up some pain”. However, I have yet to find the Azure platform limiting.

Here is some context or insight. I was previously on the product team that heavily influenced the direction and feature set of SQL Server, both box (on-premises) and cloud. My focus and specialty is related to scaling the RDBMS tier to support high-demand applications.

To that end, SQL Azure was very useful for a certain set of business problems. At the time, I certainly would not have recommended anything larger than 50GB residing in a SQL Azure database.

I also felt strongly that a significant value proposition of cloud-based RDBMS solutions lay in the as yet untapped elastic-scale possibilities.

To that end, I developed a framework for customers to leverage, which found its way (in a crippled form) into what is today's SQL Azure elastic feature. What I'm trying to say is that true elastic-scale and distributed scale of SQL Azure is hobbled. That frustrates me.

The value proposition of using SQL Azure for mobile and web app solutions is also significant, and it remains as strong as ever. This is especially the case for solutions that enjoy the benefits of structured data.

The on-going improvements of SQL Azure reaching parity with an on-premises feature set is making SQL Azure a viable option for many applications that previously couldn't even begin to look at cloud-based, non-IaaS, therefore PaaS, offerings.

In my current role, I consider SQL Azure the leader for cloud-based RDBMS solutions, far ahead of any other cloud-based RBMS offering. Where I have structured data, SQL Azure is my de facto storage tier.

• Cloud products reduce the cost of the production of software products
• You do not have to buy the product at the up-front market cost
• You pay for it as you use the product
• You can develop a product on your own premises
• Just give the key to the vendor, so that there are no separate deployment costs.
• You save on travel and meals, as well as housing required for a development team required for deployment and implementation.
• The distance between the client and development team is invisible.
• You may arrange virtual-real trainings/demos based on the affordability of the client’s budget.
• There is no requirement of special hardware, as costs and additional software are bared by the cloud platform. You can spend as you need based on what the client’s needs are and scale hardware and software up to the client’s needs.
• Cost of the platform and the software upgrades are covered under the service contract.

We developed our product with a small team of .NET developers for a client, a law university in Delhi, India.

We received the requirements from conversations of our team with our client, over the phone, and with email.

There was minimal training required for the team to be trained in cloud, as every developer in the team had basic .NET skills.

This product was then intended to be used by law university students for their training in court room sessions as student lawyers debating against each other to deduce lawful judgements of a case under study.

We provided virtual chat rooms for the students and had facilitated a method to share video sessions of their debates in virtual court rooms.

Microsoft has delivered on its promise by providing a free, developer-student (community) edition of Visual Studio.

I have used this for around 6-9 months to develop and implement the product.

There are questions in the developers’ and clients’ minds:

• Since Azure is a pay-by-use product, what is the provision for the future?
• If, for some reason, we lost this provision, what fallback parachute is Microsoft planning for customers?
• What risk planning and hedging should the client do? There is no such possibility, but the concern must be addressed by Microsoft.

Physically owned products are also subject to failure. The hardware on premise also fails and needs to be maintained, so there is expected downtime.

Microsoft provides mirroring of cloud servers. There is a sure provision of backup and restore of the cloud environment.

By centralizing these services and products at a central location (datacenter), we are optimizing on services and goods cost and sharing these costs with other cloud dwellers.

By going towards the cloud, we are going towards a virus and spyware free environment.

We are moving away from special, owned hardware and products, to cloud-based datacenters, which exist in the other resource rich, low cost, areas.

This is Platform as a Service of the SOA revolution.

Along with overseas datacenters, we shall promote near shore or local datacenters to capitalize on the cloud advantage. We will also address issues of risk hedging, which will spur job growth in local areas.

We didn’t have any scalability problems.

We did not explore this option, but the response was good for whatever we did request.

We switched due to the advantages I mentioned earlier.

You don’t have to install the product on the cloud platform. You receive a login with pre-pared software installs. Custom requirements need to be implemented or requested.

Every region of a country has cheaper locations that can provide cost advantages, and data center growth must be equally distributed on earth with electricity and resource rich, low cost, areas to keep the cost of the cloud minimal. This will also avert natural and man-made calamities.

The United States and other countries can take this cloud option to the next level of off-shoring without any immigration and terrorism issues, enabling development in impoverished areas of the world.

This can further cut down the cost of software development, other "down-the-line" products, services and goods, and will empower the poor and neglected of the world.

This will also improve trade between the countries. There are always imbalances amongst populations in any country in skills and monetary status. An equalizer could be achieved by allowing more trade, more freedom, and more pollination.

In India, we had to start development using the 3-month free subscription Azure platform .net and SQL . Now as far as I know, vs 2015 community edition is a free download. One can develop software application in it and deploy it with an Azure subscription which is pay as you use. All nitty-gritty development can be done by a development team. That's why Microsoft has delivered their dream cloud promise with the zero cost alternative of community edition.

We considered local cloud and physical install options. These options were expensive and less effective.

Microsoft Cloud is reliable and dependable.

• Availability and scalability
• Ability to understand the application and not necessarily the structure of your database
• Natural replication of the SaaS service provides efficient availability
• You can choose the geographical replication: Simply open a map and tag the new location of a replication
• Scale tab: You can change the plan of the service in terms of DTUs, point of restore, and auditing

We have configured this solution into a worldwide application based on Microsoft SQL with SQL Azure and with SQL Azure elastic pool.

Maybe the portal should have a more detailed and granular way to query data. You can use API for this purpose.

Azure is working on the query engine in order to give you the ability to analyze a query for performance with insight to improve the load or the time of a query.

I have used SQL Azure for one year along with the other Azure services.

I had no issues during our work.

It is very flexible. In the case of a heavy load period, you don’t see any difference in terms of performance. The advantage with a SaaS service is the normal scalability.

If you don't have Premium support, you need to wait for 24 hours to receive support.

Other databases like PostgreSQL and SQL Server were evaluated. We decided to switch because our .NET application works well with Microsoft solutions.

The configuration was straightforward.

You need to be careful about the size of your database or pool in order to fit it exactly within your budget.

We did not evaluate any other options.

The best use of this product is the combination with other SaaS services. Evaluate communication on premise if you need to.

• It works perfectly in the cloud.
• It made our back-end service scalable.

In many cases we use Azure as a service platform.

When larger data is collected by continuous business operations and will be processed for further analysis, we use SQL Azure.

• Scalability
• Cost efficiency
• Business continuity

• Azure SQL database
• Office 365 mail server

We are a solutions provider and we have implemented this solution for many organizations. With these customers, we have managed to reduce a lot of infrastructure budgets and to provide an eco-friendly setup. Organizations can reduce, by a lot, electricity consumption and simplify their cooling plant setup.

It needs to improve the security features, because people still aren't confident enough to use a public cloud.

I've used it for one year alongside Office 365 and Windows VM.

There wasn't much except some issues faced when migrating into the cloud.

Not much.

No issues encountered.

It's very good.

They have very good support and lots of online training as well as having seminars and customer support available. I have joined many sessions through the Microsoft Virtual Academy.

We didn't use a previous solution.

It's not complex and, in actual fact, it's easy. Ready made set-ups are available any time.

The pricing is good, but there is still a gap if you are going to manage a large setup and a big growth of an organization. If that's the case, then pricing will be big challenge especially the pricing forecast and your analysis of growth and IT budget.

I have done some studies of SalesForce AWS among others .

It's a nice, very advanced technology based project that is very secure and cost effective cut edge technology. There are lots of cost and technical resources that can be cut while implementing this solution, to manage cost budget IT infrastructure for any organization.