SQL Azure Reviews

We use SQL Azure to store our relational data. Whenever I have complex relational data with consistency requirements, I use SQL Azure Database.

I'm currently working in a small startup. There are just two people using this solution now: a developer and myself. I'm working as a technical consultant and an architect.

Microsoft recently added a JSON feature. I use all the features in a normal relational database, and they're very helpful. I prefer using Microsoft SQL Server because I like the experience and the way Microsoft handles the query tuning and security. These are really good features for database experts.

One of the nice features in Microsoft SQL Server is the SQL Server CLR, which we sometimes need to protect our procedures using C# or CLR. This feature isn't available in the SQL Azure database. It's available in the Managed Instance in the Azure Database.

You can create SOAR procedures using C# and can get user-defined functions using C#. You can extend the database and the data files using CLR files. This feature isn't available on the Microsoft Azure SQL Database. I understand they can't add it because it's a managed service, and having CLR probably doesn't work for them, but it would be nice if they could add this feature.

I have used this solution for almost six years.

I would rate the stability as eight out of ten.

It is very scalable, depending on how much you're willing to pay. We can have up to 4,000 DTUs, but we haven't needed that much scalability.

We had an instance where we weren't able to deploy Cosmos DB on a UAE data center, and Microsoft helped us. We haven't had any issues so far with technical support.

Setup is straightforward. You just create an SQL Server instance account on Azure, and then you can create SQL databases. It's very easy to create tables and procedures. I mainly use the SQL data buckets inside Visual Studio. From there, I deploy databases to Azure from Visual Studio.

It's easy to do the deployment in-house. Visual Studio provides a lot of functionality to make deploying solutions to Azure simple and easy.

Using SQL Server database with all the features will provide a good return on investment. Once you move to Azure, you remove all the capital expenses by having to acquire the license and deploy it on-premises.

When you go with SQL Azure Database, you can create a small database, which is around $4 to $5 per month for development purposes. It's very cheap in that respect. I think it's a little bit expensive compared to other services that Microsoft offers on Azure. PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB are a bit cheaper than SQL Server.

If the price were lower, I think it would become more attractive for developers to use.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. 

It's a very easy solution. Microsoft also has Data Explore. The entire Microsoft environment makes things easy for developers. It's very easy to set up SQL on Azure. I highly recommend it. I really like it, and I've been working with SQL Server since 2000.

We are using this solution for analytics and business intelligence.

The solution is deployed on-prem and on cloud. The cloud provider is Microsoft.

There are tens of thousands of users. In my market in Poland, there are maybe 1,000 using the application based on the solution.

It's user-friendly. Compared to other solutions, it's based more on clicks, not on scripts. It's easy to manage.

There could be more collaboration with other tools like Data Factory and Databricks.

I have been using this solution for 20 years.

It's stable.

It's scalable, but it could be better.

I don't use support because the documentation is very good, and the solution is easy to manage.

In Azure, deployment takes minutes. It's easy.

The cost is around $2,000 per month.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

My advice is to read the documentation and blogs.

We use it also for database management, as a database engine.

We use it for different projects - mainly when we have lots of data and the customer can't afford to pay the license for SQL Server, which is not cheap. That's the main reason we use MySQL or Postgres or other databases. 

The management and the remote access in SQL Azure are seamless.

The solution is extremely scalable.

We've found the stability to be quite good.

It's the type of product that doesn't need much technical support assistance as it works seamlessly.

Some data types are not available on SQL Azure while it's available on SQL Server. It's a little bit limited in terms of functionality. The difference is not huge. You can go back and forth between them. We used to do this all the time. However, it is something to note.

Maybe they need to add the data types that exist in SQL Server, not in SQL Azure. That would make it better.

The pricing can be high in certain countries as Microsoft doesn't adjust for regional pricing. 

The solution is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is good.

The product is on the cloud. It's very scalable for that reason. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.

Most of the time no one needs support on SQL products or services. That said, the support in Azure is amazing. We never encountered an issue that they didn't solve. This speaks to the quality of Azure.

We also use SQL Server. The main difference is SQL Server is a full-featured database engine, whereas MySQL is based on what we call a file-based database, which is similar to flat files as a database engine.

The recommendation of which to use is based on the use case. It depends on what use case the customer will need. If they don't have the capacity to manage their own server, I would recommend Azure, as it's managed. You don't have to worry about the management and administration.

The pricing is prevalent for everything Microsoft. The thing is, they don't allow different pricing for different regions. Some countries are price sensitive.

I'm an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

SQL is basically a relation database, it can be used for any key-value related data models. Anything which is a table and column-based can be used. If you are an already existing SQL customer or a document tester worker, then I think it is common to go for SQL or Oracle. More present, you have Cosmos DB, it can be used as both SQL and NoSQL databases. This is the database that we are exploring today, and what we are using more.

The most valuable aspects of this solution are the integration with the darknet stack especially Microsoft, table groups, supports major capability requirements, and SQL always-on feature.

The solution could improve by supporting more operating systems.

In a future release, I would like to see more development on SQL servers on containers where you can manage a skill across multi-clouds.

I have been using this solution for four years.

We have more than 10,000 users using the solution in my organization. 

We use Oracle products running in parallel with this solution but for different parts of our business. There are at times different requirements needed but most of the Windows systems work with this solution.

The installation was easy. They have a tool to assist with the migration of your old database to SQL.

We have a database team which is approximately 200 people. They do the engineering, optics, development, and operations. 

There is a license required to use the solution and it cost $30 to do the installation.

I would recommend this solution and we plan to use it in the future.

I rate SQL Azure a nine out of ten.

Our customers in the bank sectors use the solution for their websites. Our private customers use the solution to customize their applications on the cloud because they do not want to buy separate hardware. Some of our customers also have their on-premise SAP hosted on Azure.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that our customers do not have to manage the solution. Partners manage and optimize the solutions for the customers. 

The solution is also better cost-wise because if we host on hardware, we will have to change the hardware after four or five years. Also, if there is an issue with the hardware, the responsibility falls on the IT department. Customers do not like these responsibilities. With SQL Azure, everything is safe and secure. The clients pay a subscription fee and have fewer responsibilities.

Azure does not provide features like RDS for Oracle that AWS offers. The solution has to scale up its expertise for hosting Oracle.

My organization has been a partner with Microsoft since 2008.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. Almost ten to twelve of our customers are using the solution.

The support is good. We go to Microsoft for every escalation.

The initial setup is pretty easy. Our team is interested in working for Azure and other Microsoft products. We don't require much support from Microsoft for setup.

The deployment doesn't take much time. We only have to check for our client’s requirements. We can provide the services to the client within 15 to 20 days.

Our technical team manages the deployment. The team checks all Microsoft policies before discussing them with the customer. We draw up a proposal and then present it to our customers. We explain to our customers how their data will be added to Azure.

We may need two or three people to deploy the solution. Depending on the environment, the deployment takes one or two months or even 15 days. Once the deployment is done, the solution can be managed through a partner portal. We might also need two or three people from the customer’s organization to refresh or optimize the solution.

The price could be slightly cheaper. Our customers pay for licenses annually.

AWS secured much business in Pakistan because of RDS for Oracle. There is not much difference between AWS and Azure’s prices. AWS and Azure differ in price by a few dollars. Technically both solutions have different capabilities. AWS has a far better capability. People prefer AD authentication by AWS over Azure. We have Microsoft-certified trainers in Pakistan.

We have been asking our customers to choose Azure because they will get a lot of benefits by adopting a cloud solution. Since hardware is not easily available within Pakistan due to dollar disparity, a lot of people are choosing Azure. 

We have been pushing Azure very aggressively for the past four to five years. People continue to implement the solution despite policy challenges. One of our customers wants to host nine to ten applications on Azure. There is a lot of demand for AWS and Azure. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use SQL Azure to integrate the on-prem resources with the cloud. It creates a replica of our database in the cloud. We have more than 50 users.

SQL Azure is good with transactional systems.

If it's a transitional system, there is a lot of reporting, so the solution becomes a bit slow when it's churning out tons of data, but it's good for a mid-sized application

We've been using SQL Azure for around five years.

We are using SQL Azure extensively. It is still being utilized in the gigabyte and petabyte range for older applications, as well.

We are a gold partner, so we have the option to use gold-tier support.

Deploying SQL Azure is easy. It takes only one engineer to deploy.

We have an enterprise license. 

I rate SQL Azure nine out of 10. I would recommend it to others.

Our primary use case is for content management and publishing offsite for external users. We also use it as the intranet to get the largest professional view of the SharePoint version.

In SQL we tend to do normal queries. The features we use quite a bit are the backup and monitoring and also the export and import tools for data. We use all of these on a daily basis.

We're still discovering aspects of the solution. We haven't yet deployed all of the components, so I'm not sure of what additional features we'd like to see.

The stability is good and the performance is fantastic. Even when we try to do an inquiry into issues we can do it easily. The administration of the tool itself is perfect and the performance is good. On the safety level, we have layers of a firewall. I think this makes it more secure, to help secure the level of encryption and the encryption of the data itself. 

We deploy the solution on four machines and are using VMware. We can continue to add on top of this as much as we like. Scalability isn't a problem at all.

We have many layers of technical support, starting with us and our own team. The vendor of our region also provides support if we need it.

The initial setup is complex.

We had to do some data collecting and we had issues with having redundant databases, meaning we had to do some synchronization between the databases. We did the integration of the networks and handled the clustering on top of the components of SQL. At the beginning we faced some issues, especially getting the servers to talk to each other. We needed to do some workarounds, but ultimately we were successful.

We did the implementation ourselves. 

We have a three-year contract. The cost was somewhere around $70-80,000 for the original deployment, which was about two years ago. In the future, we may need to expand our license to include more company employees.

We did a survey for seeing what technologies were in the market. We ended up with Microsoft because of the general business requirements. Also, we could add the components to the solution for product management. We could add document management, for example, and many other alternatives that covered various business requirements. We ended up with this solution because of the ability to utilize the components. We also had the flexibility of using other plug-ins that helped with the commercial aspects of the business.

We use the private cloud version of the solution.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. I would recommend it.

About 25 people in my office use SQL Azure. Including customers, there are about 400-500 people.

We have multiple applications running for our customers that we can integrate into Azure SQL.

Scalability is an issue because we can't upgrade to new versions due to hardware limitations. 

I've been using SQL Azure for a couple of years.

I rate SQL Azure nine out of 10 for stability because we haven't faced any major issues.

I rate SQL Azure six out of 10 for scalability.

We haven't used technical support because we haven't faced any major challenges, but I would rate their documentation and knowledge base eight out of 10. 

Positive

I rate SQL Azure eight out of 10 for ease of setup. In the worst-case scenario, deployment takes a few days. A couple of employees could do it easily. Usually, it's an admin and a developer. 

I rate SQL Azure six out of 10 for ROI. We've seen a 40-50% ROI

I rate SQL Azure eight out of 10 for affordability. I live in a developing country where cost is always an issue. The price should be negotiable, and there should be more discounts.

I rate SQL Azure eight out of 10. I recommend it because we haven't faced any major issues.