Microsoft Azure has a new way for subscribers to use its SQL Database. The new subscription model offers three service tiers: Basic, Standard and Premium. They will slowly phase out the previous existing service tiers: Web and Business. The new tiers are planned to deliver more predictable performance, simplify billing and avoid costly workarounds.
Depending on the workload and their business requirements, subscribes can opt for any of the service tiers. You can have a single database with defined characteristics and pricing, or multiple databases. In both cases, Basic, Standard and Premium tiers are available.
Managing the immense data that a company collects over the years, requires tremendous effort, time and money. Cloud services is the answer for doing this correctly and with improved efficiency. Microsoft Azure SQL Database also known as SQL Azure, Windows Azure SQL Database, is a cloud-based service from Microsoft.
What is Azure SQL Database?
Azure SQL Database is a cloud based relational database service, and is based on the Microsoft SQL Server engine. It allows you the freedom to run your business without worrying about managing the infrastructure, security, network connectivity and virtual machines. You can concentrate on building your application and getting it out on the market on time.
SQL Database delivers predictable performance which you can measure, quantify and analyze. The high availability of data, is backed by data protection and security to ensure business continuity in the event of any planned or unplanned downtime or failovers. Scalable to thousands of databases, this cloud service ensures your data is synchronized, accurate and available.
How does a SQL Database work?
A typical database includes various information or data in either structured or semi-structured, or even unstructured format. It offers data storage capabilities which allows users to make relational queries against stored data, search, and even allows data analysis and data synchronization.
SQL Database is a subset of the SQL Server engine, meaning it supports existing SQL Server tools, libraries and APIs, which makes it easier for you to move and extend to the cloud.
SQL Azure supports SQL Server’s Transact-SQL (T-SQL) query language. It offers built-in support for high availability, fault tolerance and allows for data to be synchronized between your on-premises SQL Server and the cloud databases.
Basic Consideration when opting for Azure SQL Database
Here are some pointers which will you need to consider when moving your database to the Azure Cloud.
Service Tiers and Performance levels
Azure SQL offers three service tiers – Basic, Standard and Premium – which comes with varying degrees of performance and cost. Each service tier has a set database limit and performance level.
Depending on your database size, you can select the service tiers and the performance depends on it. Whenever the database limit is reached, update or insertion of data is not allowed. But delete, select, truncate or drop queries are supported.
Security
Securing the database of an application requires limiting access, protecting and monitoring tasks. Azure SQL offers connection security, authorization, authentication, and encryption of the data while it is in transit to and from the database. It also ensures auditing and compliance of the database with the various security requirements.
Data Transaction Units
DTUs is the measure of the number of database transactions that are carried out per second. A Basic tire has 5 DTUs while the Premium service tier has 1750 DTUs.
Business Continuity and SLA
Azure’s 99.99% Service Level Agreement (SLA) ensures that your app is available 24/7. This high availability is due to the geo-replication of data in different data centers. There is business continuity for easy recovery in the case of unplanned or planned events of a disaster.
For information on how you can explore Azure SQL Database for your business, please write to us on info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-4110-5555
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