What is the difference between Elastic Pools and SQL Pools in Azure SQL Server?

Hi @Jeff vG , welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

Firstly we need to understand the difference between Azure SQL and Azure Synapse. If we are not talking about very huge database and database where we are mostly dealing with transaction but not anaytics and reporting, we can go ahead with Azure SQL. Now Azure SQL database can also be used as data warehousing but it has limited capabilities based on OLTP. If we are dealing with huge set of data or big data where we are mostly dealing with data warehousing with reporting or analysis as requirement, we can go with Azure Synapse.

Azure SQL Elastic Pool: Elastic pool is created to share compute among different databases that are part of Single SQL Server. As per the article "The databases in an elastic pool are on a single server and share a set number of resources at a set price. Elastic pools in Azure SQL Database enable SaaS developers to optimize the price performance for a group of databases within a prescribed budget while delivering performance elasticity for each database."

Dedicated SQL Pools: This is a feature of Azure Synapse Service and one of the way to start analyzing data similar to Apache Spark tool or serverless SQL Pool. Once we create this, it stores the data in relational table, we can thus start importing the data through T-sql queries into it and analyze. Also it uses MPP engine to run parallel queries making the execution much faster.

Please let me know if this helps or we can discuss further.

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