SQL Database
The intelligent relational cloud database service
Azure SQL Database is the intelligent, fully-managed relational cloud database service built for developers. Accelerate app development and make maintenance easy and productive using the SQL tools you love to use. Take advantage of built-in intelligence that learns app patterns and adapts to maximize performance, reliability, and data protection.
Use built-in intelligence to protect and optimize your database
SQL Database allows you to focus on what you do best: building great apps. Seamlessly enable DevOps by developing in SQL Server containers and deploying in SQL Database with the easy-to-use tools you already have, such as Visual Studio and SQL Server Management Studio. Or, build your applications with Python, Java, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and .NET on the MacOS, Linux, and Windows platforms and deliver with the speed and efficiency your business demands.
“Using the automatic tuning feature, our team was able to quickly and efficiently fine tune our databases. Since we have over 1400 databases, traditional methods of tuning would be very labor intensive. However, with automatic tuning we were able to analyze 1000’s of queries and get them tuned instantly.” 
Optimize performance for your workloads
When demand for your app grows from a handful of devices and customers to millions, SQL Database scales, on the fly, with minimal downtime. Additionally, SQL Database provides in-memory OLTP that improves throughput and latency on transactional processing workloads up to 30x over traditional table and database engines and delivers faster business insights with up to 100X faster queries and reports over traditional row-oriented storage.1
“The addition of In-Memory OLTP tables and native-compiled stored procedures to one SQL Database immediately reduced our DTU consumption by 70 percent and allowed us to support rapid growth without investing significant effort to maintain performance. For data-centric services, in-memory support provides instant scale to existing applications with few to no changes outside of the database.” Build multitenant apps with customer isolation and efficiency
If you’re a software as a service (SaaS) app developer writing a multitenant app that serves many customers, you often have to make tradeoffs in customer performance, efficiencies, and security. SQL Database removes the compromise and helps you maximize your resource utilization and manage thousands of databases as one while ensuring one-customer-per-database with elastic pools.
“Elastic pools are a perfect fit for our SaaS offering because we can dial capacity up and down as needed. Provisioning is easy, and with our setup, we can keep utilization at a maximum.” 
Work in your preferred development environment
SQL Database allows you to focus on what you do best: building great apps. Seamlessly enable DevOps by developing in SQL Server containers and deploying in SQL Database with the easy-to-use tools you already have, such as Visual Studio and SQL Server Management Studio. Or, build your applications with Python, Java, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and .NET on the MacOS, Linux, and Windows platforms and deliver with the speed and efficiency your business demands.
“Most of our applications are written in Microsoft .NET Framework and C#, and we were already a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement customer, so Azure licensing was attractive. But from a technical perspective, Azure really matched up with the way we did things. It was developer-focused, with a great developer ecosystem such as a rich set of APIs, networking that’s very easy to use, and Azure SQL Database, which lets us port our databases to the cloud with no code modifications.” Helps protect and secure app data
SQL Database helps you build security-enhanced apps in the cloud by providing advanced built-in protection and security features that dynamically mask sensitive data and encrypt it at rest and in motion. Ensure high availability with three hot replicas and built-in automatic failover that guarantees a 99.99% availability SLA.2 Accelerate recovery from catastrophic failures and regional outages to an RPO of less than 5 seconds with active-geo replication. With physical and operational security, SQL Database helps you meet the most stringent regulatory compliances, such as ISO/IEC 27001/27002, Fed RAMP/FISMA, SOC, HIPPA and PCI DSS.
Customers using SQL Database
New to SQL Database?
Read What is the Azure SQL Database service? to see if our intelligent, fully-managed database service is right for your applications, including multi-tenant SaaS or line of business app scenarios. Watch this brief video to see how you can have your first SQL Database up and running in minutes.
Just how easy is it?
Try it and see for yourself. Create your first SQL Database in Azure with your free Azure account.
Got a multi-tenant SaaS app?
Learn how to easily implement a SaaS app for hundreds – or thousands – of tenants in SQL Database.
All setup? Optimize your database!
Take the next steps to optimize performance using recommendations generated by SQL Database. Then, check out these other monitoring and performance tuning options.
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