In our previous articles, Introduction to SQL Server 2012 and Windows Azure Overview, we made references to Microsoft’s SQL Azure service. In this article we will take a closer look at its main features in more detail.

SQL Azure is a relational database solution with the capability to support both Windows Azure and on-premise applications with minimum latency. It is considered a managed service and it’s offered by Microsoft to allow you to build applications without concerning yourself about the storage they’ll use. Being a cloud service, SQL Azure gives you all the benefits of the cloud including:

-          The hardware and software that support the SQL database are all managed by Microsoft

-          Patching and maintenance are also managed by Microsoft

-          High availability and fault tolerance are guaranteed by an SLA (Service-level agreement)

-          Per usage billing and the availability to scale up or down whenever you have the need

All these features contribute to SQL Azure’s eased management. The service-level agreement is backed up by powerful and extremely secure datacenters offering you maximum protection of your databases. SQL Azure is built entirely on top of SQL Server and offers most of SQL Server’s features, such as the Tabular Data Streams (TDSs) for connecting, databases with tables, views, stored procedures, indexes, etc. They are all managed using the standard T-SQL language. SQL Azure allows you to store up to 150 GB of information in your database. If you need more storage for a database, you will have to spread it out over multiple databases and use parallel queries
Read the full post