Editor’s Note: This post comes from Ann Bachrach, Senior Product Marketing Manager in our SQL Server team. 

Forrester Research, Inc. has positioned Microsoft as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Cloud Databases, Q4 2012. In the report posted here Microsoft received the highest scores of any vendor in Current Offering and Market Presence. Forrester describes its rigorous and lengthy Wave process: “To evaluate the vendors and their products against our set of criteria, we gather details of product qualifications through a combination of lab evaluations, questionnaires, demos, and/or discussions with client references.”

Forrester notes that “cloud database offerings represent a new space within the broader data management platform market, providing enterprises with an abstracted option to support agile development and new social, mobile, cloud, and eCommerce applications as well as lower IT costs.”

Within this context, Forrester identified the benefits of Windows Azure SQL Database as follows: “With this service, you can provision a SQL Server database easily, with simplified administration, high availability, scalability, and its familiar development model,” and  “although there is a 150 GB limit on the individual database size with SQL Database, customers are supporting multiple terabytes by using each database as a shard and integrating it through the application.”

From the Microsoft case study site, here are a few examples of customers taking advantage of these features:

• Fujitsu System Solutions: “Developers at Fsol can also rapidly provision new databases on SQL Database, helping the company to quickly scale up or scale down its databases, just as it can for its compute needs with Windows Azure.”
• Connect2Field: “With SQL Database, the replication of data happens automatically…. For an individual company to run its own data replication is really complicated.… If we were to lose any one of our customer’s data, we would lose so much credibility that we wouldn’t be able to get any more customers. Data loss would destroy our customers’ businesses too.”
• Flavorus: “By using sharding with SQL Database, we can have tons of customers on the site at once trying to buy tickets.”

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