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Applies to: Azure SQL Database Azure SQL Managed Instance SQL Server on Azure VM
Azure SQL is a family of managed, secure, and intelligent products that use the SQL Server database engine in the Azure cloud. Azure SQL is built upon the familiar SQL Server engine, so you can migrate applications with ease and continue to use the tools, languages, and resources you're familiar with. Your skills and experience transfer to the cloud, so you can do even more with what you already have.
The three products in the Azure SQL family are:
Learn how each product fits into Microsoft's Azure SQL data platform to match the right option for your business requirements. Whether you prioritize cost savings or minimal administration, this article can help you decide which approach delivers against the business requirements you care about most.
If you're new to Azure SQL, check out the What is Azure SQL video from our in-depth Azure SQL video series:
In today's data-driven world, driving digital transformation increasingly depends on our ability to manage massive amounts of data and harness its potential. But today's data estates are increasingly complex, with data hosted on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge of the network. Developers who are building intelligent and immersive applications can find themselves constrained by limitations that can ultimately impact their experience. Limitations arising from incompatible platforms, inadequate data security, insufficient resources, and price-performance barriers create complexity that can inhibit app modernization and development.
One of the first things to understand in any discussion of Azure versus on-premises SQL Server databases is that you can use it all. Microsoft's data platform uses SQL Server technology and makes it available across physical on-premises machines, private cloud environments, third-party hosted private cloud environments, and the public cloud.
Spend more time innovating and less time patching, updating, and backing up your databases. Azure is the only cloud with evergreen SQL that automatically applies the latest updates and patches so that your databases are always up to date, which eliminates end-of-support hassle. Even complex tasks like performance tuning, high availability, disaster recovery, and backups are automated, freeing you to focus on your applications.
Azure constantly monitors your data for threats. With Azure SQL, you can:
There are several factors that can influence your decision to choose between the different data offerings:
As seen in the diagram, each service offering can be characterized by the level of administration you have over the infrastructure, and by the degree of cost efficiency.
In Azure, you can have your SQL Server workloads running as a hosted service (PaaS), or a hosted infrastructure (IaaS) supporting the software layer, such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or an application. Within PaaS, you have multiple product options, and service tiers within each option. The key question that you need to ask when deciding between PaaS or IaaS is - do you want to manage your database, apply patches, and take backups - or do you want to delegate these operations to Azure?
Azure SQL Database is a relational database-as-a-service (DBaaS) hosted in Azure that falls into the industry category of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
With SQL Server, built-in features and functionality often require extensive configuration (either on-premises or in an Azure virtual machine). When using SQL Database, you pay-as-you-go with options to scale up or out for greater power with no interruption. SQL Database has some additional features that aren't available in SQL Server, such as built-in high availability, intelligence, and management.
Azure SQL Database offers the following deployment options:
Azure SQL Managed Instance falls into the industry category of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and is best for most migrations to the cloud. SQL Managed Instance is a collection of system and user databases with a shared set of resources that is lift-and-shift ready.
SQL Server on Azure VMs falls into the industry category Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and allows you to run SQL Server inside a fully managed virtual machine (VM) in Azure.
Differences between Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and SQL Server on Azure VMs are listed in the following table, but both SQL Database and SQL Managed Instance are optimized to reduce overall management costs to a minimum for provisioning and managing many databases. Ongoing administration costs are reduced since you don't have to manage any virtual machines, operating system, or database software. You don't have to manage upgrades, high availability, or backups.
In general, SQL Database and SQL Managed Instance can dramatically increase the number of databases managed by a single IT or development resource. Elastic pools for SQL Database also support SaaS multitenant application architectures with features including tenant isolation and the ability to scale to reduce costs by sharing resources across databases. SQL Managed Instance provides support for instance-scoped features enabling easy migration of existing applications, as well as sharing resources among databases. Whereas SQL Server on Azure VMs provide DBAs with an experience most similar to the on-premises environment they're familiar with.
Azure SQL Database | Azure SQL Managed Instance | SQL Server on Azure VMs |
---|---|---|
Supports most on-premises database-level capabilities. The most commonly used SQL Server features are available. 99.995% availability guaranteed. Built-in backups, patching, recovery. Latest stable Database Engine version. Ability to assign necessary resources (CPU/storage) to individual databases. Built-in advanced intelligence and security. Online change of resources (CPU/storage). |
Supports almost all on-premises instance-level and database-level capabilities. High compatibility with SQL Server. 99.99% availability guaranteed. Built-in backups, patching, recovery. Latest stable Database Engine version. Easy migration from SQL Server. Private IP address within Azure Virtual Network. Built-in advanced intelligence and security. Online change of resources (CPU/storage). |
You have full control over the SQL Server engine. Supports all on-premises capabilities. Up to 99.99% availability. Full parity with the matching version of on-premises SQL Server. Easy migration from SQL Server. Private IP address within Azure Virtual Network. You have the ability to deploy application or services on the host where SQL Server is placed. Manage your SQL Server VM from the Azure portal and unlock a number of additional benefits when you register with the SQL Server IaaS agent extension. |
Migration from SQL Server might be challenging. Some SQL Server features aren't available. Configurable maintenance windows. Compatibility with the SQL Server version can be achieved only using database compatibility levels. Private IP address support with Azure Private Link. |
There's still some minimal number of SQL Server features that aren't available. Configurable maintenance windows. Compatibility with the SQL Server version can be achieved only using database compatibility levels. |
You might use manual or automated backups. You need to implement your own High-Availability solution. There's a downtime while changing the resources(CPU/storage) |
Databases of up to 128 TB. | Up to 16 TB. | SQL Server instances with up to 256 TB of storage. The instance can support as many databases as needed. |
On-premises application can access data in Azure SQL Database. | Native virtual network implementation and connectivity to your on-premises environment using Azure Express Route or VPN Gateway. | With SQL virtual machines, you can have applications that run partly in the cloud and partly on-premises. For example, you can extend your on-premises network and Active Directory Domain to the cloud via Azure Virtual Network. For more information on hybrid cloud solutions, see Extending on-premises data solutions to the cloud. |
Whether you're a startup that is strapped for cash, or a team in an established company that operates under tight budget constraints, limited funding is often the primary driver when deciding how to host your databases.
In this section, learn about the billing and licensing basics in Azure associated with the Azure SQL family of products, and calculating the total application cost.
Currently, both SQL Database and SQL Managed Instance are sold as a service and are available with several options and in several service tiers with different prices for resources, all of which are billed hourly at a fixed rate based on the service tier and compute size you choose. For the latest information on the current supported service tiers, compute sizes, and storage amounts, see DTU-based purchasing model and vCore-based purchasing model for both SQL Database and SQL Managed Instance.
In addition, you're billed for outgoing Internet traffic at regular data transfer rates. You can dynamically adjust service tiers and compute sizes to match your application's varied throughput needs.
With SQL Database and SQL Managed Instance, the database software is automatically configured, patched, and upgraded by Azure, which reduces your administration costs. In addition, its built-in backup capabilities help you achieve significant cost savings, especially when you have a large number of databases.
With SQL Server on Azure VMs, you can use any of the platform-provided SQL Server images (which includes a license) or bring your SQL Server license. All the supported SQL Server versions (2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019) and editions (Developer, Express, Web, Standard, Enterprise) are available. In addition, Bring-Your-Own-License versions (BYOL) of the images are available. When using the Azure provided images, the operational cost depends on the VM size and the edition of SQL Server you choose. Regardless of VM size or SQL Server edition, you pay per-minute licensing cost of SQL Server and the Windows or Linux Server, along with the Azure Storage cost for the VM disks. The per-minute billing option allows you to use SQL Server for as long as you need without buying addition SQL Server licenses. If you bring your own SQL Server license to Azure, you're charged for server and storage costs only. For more information on bring-your-own licensing, see License Mobility through Software Assurance on Azure. In addition, you're billed for outgoing Internet traffic at regular data transfer rates.
When you start using a cloud platform, the cost of running your application includes the cost for new development and ongoing administration costs, plus the public cloud platform service costs.
For more information on pricing, see the following resources:
For many businesses, the decision to transition to a cloud service is as much about offloading complexity of administration as it's cost. With IaaS and PaaS, Azure administers the underlying infrastructure and automatically replicates all data to provide disaster recovery, configures and upgrades the database software, manages load balancing, and does transparent failover if there's a server failure within a data center.
For many IT departments, meeting up-time obligations of a service-level agreement (SLA) is a top priority. In this section, we look at what SLA applies to each database hosting option.
For both Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance, Microsoft provides an availability SLA of 99.99%. For the latest information, see Service-level agreement.
For SQL Server on Azure VMs, Microsoft provides an availability SLA of 99.95% for two virtual machines in an availability set, or 99.99% for two virtual machines in different availability zones. This means that at least one of the two virtual machines is available for the given SLA, but it doesn't cover the processes (such as SQL Server) running on the VM. For the latest information, see the VM SLA. For database high availability (HA) within VMs, you should configure one of the supported high availability options in SQL Server, such as Always On availability groups. Using a supported high availability option doesn't provide an additional SLA, but allows you to achieve >99.99% database availability.
Azure SQL Database is the right solution for cloud-designed applications when developer productivity and fast time-to-market for new solutions are critical. With programmatic DBA-like functionality, it's perfect for cloud architects and developers as it lowers the need for managing the underlying operating system and database.
Azure SQL Managed Instance greatly simplifies the migration of existing applications to Azure, enabling you to bring migrated database applications to market in Azure quickly.
SQL Server on Azure VMs is perfect if your existing or new applications require large databases or access to all features in SQL Server or Windows/Linux, and you want to avoid the time and expense of acquiring new on-premises hardware. It's also a good fit when you want to migrate existing on-premises applications and databases to Azure as-is - in cases where SQL Database or SQL Managed Instance aren't a good fit. Since you don't need to change the presentation, application, and data layers, you save time and budget on having to rearchitect your existing solution. Instead, you can focus on migrating all your solutions to Azure and in doing some performance optimizations that might be required by the Azure platform. For more information, see Performance Best Practices for SQL Server on Azure VMs.
The Azure portal provides a single page where you can manage all of your Azure SQL resources including your SQL Server on Azure virtual machines (VMs).
To access the Azure SQL page, from the Azure portal menu, select Azure SQL or search for and select Azure SQL in any page.
Note
Azure SQL provides a quick and easy way to access all of your SQL resources in the Azure portal, including single and pooled databases in Azure SQL Database as well as the logical server hosting them, Azure SQL Managed Instances, and SQL Server on Azure VMs. Azure SQL is not a service or resource, but rather a family of SQL-related services.
To manage existing resources, select the desired item in the list. To create new Azure SQL resources, select + Create.
After selecting + Create, view additional information about the different options by selecting Show details on any tile.
For details, see:
For overviews:
To create resources:
For pricing:
To migrate:
Events
Mar 31, 11 PM - Apr 2, 11 PM
The ultimate Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, SQL, and AI community-led event. March 31 to April 2, 2025.
Register todayTraining
Module
Provision an Azure SQL database to store application data - Training
Find out what makes Azure SQL Database a good choice for your relational database, how to create the database from the portal and connect with Azure Cloud Shell.
Certification
Microsoft Certified: Azure Database Administrator Associate - Certifications
Administer an SQL Server database infrastructure for cloud, on-premises and hybrid relational databases using the Microsoft PaaS relational database offerings.