Developers building software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications can use Azure SQL Database to provide flexibility to support both explosive growth and profitable business models. For workloads with unpredictable database resource consumption, the elastic database model gives you the ability to pool resources to use among a group of databases. Instead of overprovisioning to meet peak demand, you can use an elastic database pool to let hundreds or thousands of databases use resources within a budget that you control. You can drive cost efficiencies with a purchase model that lets you maintain control over price and performance across a group of databases.
Simple management tasks become complicated when you scale to thousands of databases, and that's the challenge of explosive growth. As the business grows, SaaS developers spend countless hours writing complex logic to handle schema changes and other administrative operations. With elastic databases, life becomes easier. You take a script, submit it as a job, and SQL Database does the rest to perform the script across many databases. Elastic database tools simplify building and managing applications that scale across lots of databases, so building applications against a single database or thousands of databases is just as easy using familiar T-SQL and ADO.NET programming models. You can also run centralized query operations like reporting and data extractions spanning many databases, returning a single unified result set.
Backed by the power and presence of Azure, high-throughput applications can take advantage of the latest version which delivers 25% more Premium database power. Additionally, internal tests over 600 million rows of data show up to 100x query performance improvements when applying the in-memory columnstore technology. SQL Database service tiers enable applications to easily scale up or down for predictable performance on each database.
Gain peace of mind about data availability with built-in replicas and a competitive 99.99%* Microsoft-backed SLA at the database level. Enjoy more application continuity and protection against catastrophic events with built-in continuity options across service tiers, now with as much as 360x lower disaster recovery objectives. Active geo-replication allows you to create up to 4 readable secondaries in any Azure region and control when and where to failover. Gain more control over “oops recovery” with self-service restore, which offers you control over data restoration from available data backups. Up to 35 days of backups are available to you for recovery.
Learn more about business continuity with Azure SQL Database
* The 99.99% uptime SLA applies to Basic, Standard, and Premium service tiers only. SQL Database Web and Business Editions have an established uptime SLA of 99.9%.
Remove virtually all infrastructure maintenance with SQL Database, which provides automatic software patching as part of the service. Meanwhile, built-in system replicas using the quorum writes technique help deliver inherent data protection, database uptime, and system stability, which means fewer hassles for developers and architects. System replicas are automatically moved to new computers, which are provisioned on the fly as old ones fail.
With a near-complete SQL Server programmable surface area, you can more easily migrate on-premises SQL Server applications to Azure to help drive down datacenter costs and improve IT productivity. Available in preview, full-text search allows fast and flexible indexing for keyword-based querying of text data stored in tables. Drive DevOps tasks such as scale out or business continuity using programmatic APIs for streamlined management as you scale to hundreds or thousands of databases. SQL Database offers a choice of management tools—REST APIs, PowerShell, the Azure portal with HTML5 support, or SQL Server Management Studio—and supports a choice of popular platforms and technologies, including .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and Node.js. With Visual Studio integration, enjoy seamless development online or offline and across on-premises and cloud-designed apps.
SQL Database offers a portfolio of security features to help you further meet organizational or industry-mandated compliance policies. Streamline compliance-related tasks, and gain knowledge about activities taking place within your database with Auditing, which tracks and logs events that occur on your database. You can also implement policies at the database level to help limit access to sensitive data with Row-Level Security, Dynamic Data Masking, and Transparent Data Encryption for Azure SQL Database. Also, SQL Database is verified by key cloud auditors as part of the scope of key Azure compliance certifications and approvals such as HIPAA BAA, ISO/IEC 27001:2005, FedRAMP, and E.U. Model Clauses.
"The firewall and security configurations in SQL [Database] are great. Our cloud-based services are now as secure as our datacenter-based services."
SQL Database is offered in different service tiers to support lightweight to heavyweight database workloads, so you can move across or blend tiers for innovative application designs. With the power and reach of Azure, you can mix-and-match Azure services with SQL Database to meet your unique modern app design needs, drive cost and resource efficiencies, and unlock new business opportunities. Visit the SQL Database pricing page for details.