Azure SQL Price-Performance Reports | Microsoft Azure
SQL Transaction Processing and Analytic Performance Price-Performance Testing; The Economic Value of Azure SQL; Performance and value comparison of three SQL Server instances
Reduce costs, drive efficiency, and improve business agility by migrating to Azure. Explore third-party research to see why Azure SQL is a market leader.
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Save on costs and optimize performance with Azure SQL

Migrate and modernize your data estate to lower your total cost of ownership, achieve productivity gains, and accelerate time to market with faster app development cycles. Learn more about the Azure SQL family of managed services—and find out how to save on costs, achieve flexibility at scale, and meet peaks in demand with an end-to-end solution.

Explore these independent research reports to compare costs and workloads and see why Azure SQL is a market leader.

SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines leads SQL Server on AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)

Explore this report from GigaOm and see why SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines came out on top in overall speed and price-performance when compared to SQL Server on Amazon EC2. Read the full report for details on how SQL Server 2019 on Windows Server 2022 on Azure Virtual Machines provided price-performance that was up to 54 percent less expensive than AWS SQL Server 2019 on Windows Server 2022.1

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The Economic Value of Azure SQL

Get a full breakdown of the benefits and economic value of migrating your on-premises SQL server to Azure SQL—and see how customers saved money and boosted their potential revenue using Azure SQL.

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Azure SQL Managed Instance outperformed Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for SQL Server

Find out how Azure SQL Managed Instance outperformed Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) in testing done by Principled Technologies. Read the full report for details on how three Azure SQL managed instances offered up to five times faster performance and up to 90.3 better price/performance when compared to SQL Server on AWS RDS.2

Read the Principled Technologies report

1Price-performance claims based on data from a study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by GigaOm in January 2023. The study compared price performance between SQL Server 2019 Enterprise edition on Windows Server 2022 in Azure E32bds_v5 instance type with P30 Premium SSD disks and SQL Server 2019 Enterprise Edition on Windows Server 2022 in Amazon Web Services Elastic Cloud Compute instance type r5b.8xlarge with General Purpose (gp3) volumes. Benchmark data is taken from two tests:

  • The GigaOm Transactional Field Test derived from a recognized industry standard, TPC Benchmark™ E (TPC-E). The Field Test does not implement the full TPC-E benchmark and as such is not comparable to any published TPC-E benchmarks.
  • The GigaOm Analytics Field test derived from the TPC-H Benchmark. The field test does not implement the full TPC-H benchmark and as such is not comparable to any published TPC_H benchmarks.

Prices are based on publicly available US pricing in North Central US for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines and Oregon for AWS EC2 as of January 2023. The pricing incorporates three-year reservations for Azure and AWS compute pricing, and Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server and Windows Server, and License Mobility for SQL Server in AWS, excluding Software Assurance and support costs. Actual results and prices may vary based on configuration and region.

2Price-performance claims based on data from a study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by Principled Technologies in April 2022. The study compared performance and price performance between a 16 vCore, 64 vCore and 80 vCore Azure SQL Managed Instance using premium-series hardware on the business-critical service tier and the db.m6i.32xlarge, db.r5b.4xlarge and db.r5b.16xlarge offerings for Amazon Web Services Relational Database Service (AWS RDS) on SQL Server. Benchmark data is taken from a Principled Technologies report using recognized standards, HammerDB TPROC-C, HammerDB TPROC-H and Microsoft MSOLTPE, a workload derived from TPC-E. The MSOLTPE is derived from the TPC-E benchmark and as such is not comparable to published TPC-E results, as MSOLTPE results do not comply with the TPC-E Specification. The results are based on a mixture of read-only and update intensive transactions that simulate activities found in complex OLTP and analytics application environments. Price-performance is calculated by Principled Technologies as the cost of running the cloud platform continuously divided by transactions per minute or per second throughput, based upon the standard. Prices are based on publicly available US pricing in South Central US for Azure SQL Managed Instance and US East for AWS RDS as of April 2022 and incorporates Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server, excluding Software Assurance and support costs. Performance and price-performance results are based upon the configurations detailed in the Principled Technologies report. Actual results and prices may vary based on configuration and region.


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