Azure SQL Database Reviews & Product Details

The fact that it's in the cloud makes this a lot less maintenance than a regular on-premise SQL database. But the regular SQL-Database is already very low on maintenance, so it's not that much of an advantage. What I like best is that you can tag columns as sensitive, and apply very easy masking to fields like email. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I think it's very expensive. If you own an on-premise license (which you can import into azure, luckily), it's cheaper to implement an on-premise database. A cloud database is not all positive either, you need extra security and VPN gateways and every single thing costs you money. Also, you geta few additional capabilities, but you lose the conveniency of a fully functioning SQL Management studio. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is easy to use same features as any other database and there are few features the really help alot. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It still lacks few more useful features that will make it more useful Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Easy to configure. Low in cost compared to its competitors Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

No SQL agent to customise the jobs accordingly Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Azure Sql database Is the best tool for data warehousing projects, the tool is user friendly Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I did not face any issues with Azure Sql database Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Infra management is taken care of by Microsoft itself. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing. it's an excellent product as a managed SQL Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Cost and size of data that it can hold in cloud Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not applicable, i don't see any issues wiht it Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

If you have knowledge about the old SQL server then it will be very useful to use this. And within a minute it will run your SQL instances. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing. But if you want to run for small services then the price Azure SQL database will be high for you. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ease of setup and use is great - you can have a SQL server and database setup and running in Azure within 5 minutes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

At the lower price points, the performance can be pretty bad. Using the DTU pricing models, which is all that's available at the lower ranges, the throughput is poor and your database will stop operating once you hit the DTU threshold. There's no warning, connections and transactions just fail. The storage capacity to compute capacity balance at the lower price points is wrong. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like how simple it was to use and to teach to others. It's ownership by Microsoft ensures I get the support I need if need be and it also gurantees there is quality in the product. Was not hard to deploy it all, especially if you already use other Microsoft products as well so it's convienent to have everything under one company in one place. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It looks a bit intimidating but no real issues, it works just as you would normally expect it to. For normal users, not all accounts get a free trial for Azure but some do. It's a bit finicky but if it's for business purposes this isn't an issue. Not much to dislike especially how low scale this was for me, however it varies for each user so take everything with a grain of salt. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Quick an easy to launch a SQL instance with robust security offerings Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Everything else,

pricing - essentially paying for enterprise license at every scale point, regardless of need, BYOL helps, but you pay a lot for very mediocre hardware/performance

support - even with premier support it would take on average 2 weeks to resolution for bugs, and even performance issues would generally take 6+ hours before magically disappearing

stability - node changes with up to 30s downtime every 4-7 days, breaking changes that you cannot opt out of, essentially you are in a constant Beta

limitations - DTU model and vCore are fundamentally broken for > 500Gb databases in terms of backup/restore and migration, regardless of pool/db DTU/vCore size

differences - Just enough differences from standard SQL that you will likely have to make changes to your applications

migration limitations - It is fairly easy to migrate-in, but we evaluated about 8 different tools to migrate data back out and it was painful due to larger database sizes

api/cli instability - with about 400 databases and 2-10 CRUD operations/week in terms of database pools we constantly had to manually monitor our automation

increased DBA needs - there were so many new issues with Azure and tools/scripts that needed to be modified that we had to add a new DBA and rework most of our automation. Even after 18 months, we still were at higher DBA utilization than before Azure

DevOps needs - Not purely and Azure SQL issue, but the fact is that I can fairly easily find/hire someone to build a SQL cluster, finding an experienced Azure DevOps engineer is extremely difficult. With Azure SQL being proprietary there isn't much tooling that works with it well either

Documentation - As-is the case with most of Azure, the documentation is scattered, generally outdated, and often wrong. We often went through Premier support, but even then we would often get an answer that was either old or just didn't work. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.