SQL Azure vs.

SQL Server
Authors
Dinakar Nethi, Niraj Nagrani

Technical Reviewers
Michael Thomassy, David Robinson

Published
April 2010

Summary
SQL Azure Database is a cloud-based relational database service from Microsoft. SQL Azure provides
relational database functionality as a utility service. Cloud-based database solutions such as SQL Azure
can provide many benefits, including rapid provisioning, cost-effective scalability, high availability, and
reduced management overhead. This paper compares SQL Azure Database with SQL Server in terms of
logical administration vs. physical administration, provisioning, Transact-SQL support, data storage,
SSIS, along with other features and capabilities.
Copyright
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Contents
..................................................................................................................................................................... 1
Similarities and Differences........................................................................................................................4
Logical Administration vs. Physical Administration...............................................................................4
Provisioning............................................................................................................................................4
Transact-SQL Support.............................................................................................................................5
Features and Types..................................................................................................................................5
Key Benefits of the Service.........................................................................................................................5
Self-Managing.........................................................................................................................................5
High Availability.....................................................................................................................................5
Scalability................................................................................................................................................5
Familiar Development Model..................................................................................................................6
Relational Data Model.............................................................................................................................6

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Similarities and Differences
Similar to an instance of SQL Server on your premises, SQL Azure exposes a tabular data stream (TDS)
interface for Transact-SQL-based database access. This allows your database applications to use SQL
Azure in the same way that they use SQL Server. Since SQL Azure is a service, administration in SQL Azure
is slightly different.

Unlike administration for an on-premise instance of SQL Server, SQL Azure abstracts the logical
administration from the physical administration; you continue to administer databases, logins, users, and
roles, but Microsoft administers and configures the physical hardware such as hard drives, servers, and
storage. This approach helps SQL Azure provide a large-scale multi-tenant database service that offers
enterprise-class availability, scalability, security, and self-healing.

Since Microsoft handles all of the physical administration, there are some differences between SQL Azure
and an on-premise instance of SQL Server in terms of administration, provisioning, Transact-SQL support,
programming model, and features. For more information, see Guidelines and Limitations (SQL Azure
Database).

Logical Administration vs. Physical Administration

Although SQL Azure plays an active role in managing the physical resources of the database, the DBA
plays a very important role in administering SQL Azure-based database applications. Using SQL Azure,
DBAs manage schema creation, statistics management, index tuning, query optimization, and security
administration (logins, users, roles, etc.). For more information about security administration in SQL Azure,
see Managing Logins and Users in SQL Azure.

Database administration in SQL Azure differs most from SQL Server in terms of physical administration.
SQL Azure automatically replicates all data to provide high availability. SQL Azure also manages load
balancing and, in case of a server failure, transparent fail-over to a healthy machine hosting one of the
backup copies of your database.

To provide this level of physical administration, you cannot control the physical resources of SQL Azure.
For example, you cannot specify the physical hard drive or file group where a database or index will
reside. Because the computer file system is not accessible and all data is automatically replicated, SQL
Server backup and restore commands are not applicable to SQL Azure. The SQL Azure service still backs
up all databases; however they are not accessible to regular users. This is a feature that may be offered in
future.

Provisioning
When preparing an on-premises SQL Server deployment, it may be the role of the DBA or IT department
to prepare and configure the required hardware and software. When using SQL Azure, these tasks are
performed by the SQL Azure provisioning process.

You can begin provisioning your SQL Azure databases after you create a Windows Azure Platform
account. This account allows you to access all the services, such as Windows Azure, AppFabric, and SQL
Azure, and is used to set up and manage your subscriptions.

Each SQL Azure subscription is bound to one SQL Azure server within one of the Microsoft data centers.
Your SQL Azure server is an abstraction that defines a grouping of databases. To enable load-balancing
and high availability, databases associated with your SQL Azure server may reside on separate physical

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computers within the Microsoft data center. Currently our data centers are located at Chicago (North
Central US), San Antonio (South Central US), Dublin (West Europe), Amsterdam (North Europe), Singapore
(Southeast Asia) and Hong Kong (East Asia). More data centers will likely be added in future.

For more information about provisioning, see SQL Azure Provisioning Model.

Transact-SQL Support
Many SQL Server Transact-SQL statements have parameters that allow you to specify file groups or
physical file paths. These types of parameters are not supported in SQL Azure because they have
dependencies on the physical configuration. In such cases, the command is considered partially
supported. For more information about Transact-SQL support, see Transact-SQL Support (SQL Azure
Database).

Features and Types

SQL Azure does not support all of the features and data types found in SQL Server. Analysis Services,
Replication, Reporting Services, and Service Broker are not currently provided as services on the SQL
Azure. However, you can connect from on-premises Reporting Server or Analysis Server to SQL Azure and
SQL Azure can be used either as a data source or destination.

Because SQL Azure performs the physical administration, any statements and options that attempt to
directly manipulate physical resources will be blocked, such as Resource Governor, file group references,
and some physical server DDL statements. It is also not possible to set server options and SQL trace flags
or use the SQL Server Profiler or the Database Tuning Advisor utilities.

Key Benefits of the Service

The benefits of using SQL Azure are manifold. These include manageability, high availability, scalability, a
familiar development model, and a relational data model.

Self-Managing
SQL Azure offers the scale and functionality of an enterprise data center without the administrative
overhead that is associated with on-premise instances of SQL Server. This self-managing capability
enables organizations to provision data services for applications throughout the enterprise without
adding to the support burden of the central IT department or distracting technology-savvy employees
from their core tasks in order to maintain a departmental database application.

With SQL Azure, you can provision your data storage in seconds. This reduces the initial costs of data
services by enabling you to provision only what you need. When your needs change, you can easily
extend your cloud-based data storage to meet those needs.

High Availability
SQL Azure is built on proven Windows Server and SQL Server technologies, and is flexible enough to cope
with any variations in usage and load. The service replicates multiple redundant copies of your data to
multiple physical servers to maintain data availability and business continuity. In the case of a hardware
failure, SQL Azure provides automatic failover to ensure availability for your application.

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Scalability
A key advantage of SQL Azure is the ease with which you can scale your solution. As data grows,
databases need to either scale up or scale out. Scale up always has a ceiling whereas scale out has no
virtual limits. A common scale out technique is data-partitioning. After partitioning your data, the service
scales as your data grows. A pay-as-you-grow pricing model makes sure that you only pay for the storage
that you use, so that you can also scale down the service when you do not need it.

Familiar Development Model

When developers create on-premise applications that use SQL Server, they use client libraries like
ADO.NET, ODBC that use the tabular data stream (TDS) protocol to communicate between client and
server. SQL Azure provides the same TDS interface as SQL Server so that you can use the same tools and
libraries to build client applications for data that is stored in SQL Azure. For more about TDS, see Network
Protocols and TDS Endpoints.

Relational Data Model

SQL Azure will seem very familiar to developers and administrators because data is stored in SQL Azure
just like it is stored in SQL Server, by using the familiar relational data model. Conceptually similar to an
on-premise instance of SQL Server, a SQL Azure server is logical group of databases that acts as an
authorization boundary.

Within each SQL Azure server, you can create multiple databases that have tables, views, stored
procedures, indices, and other familiar database objects. This data model makes good use of your existing
relational database design and Transact-SQL programming skills, and simplifies the process of migrating
existing on-premise database applications to SQL Azure. For more about Transact-SQL and its relationship
to SQL Azure, see Transact-SQL Support (SQL Azure Database).

SQL Azure servers and databases are virtual objects that do not correspond to physical servers and
databases. By insulating you from the physical implementation, SQL Azure enables you to spend time on
your database design and adding value to the business.

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Feature SQL Server SQL Azure Mitigation
(On-premise)

Data Storage No size limits as  Web Edition  An archival process can be created
such  Business Edition where older data can be migrated
Exact size and pricing information can be to another database in SQL Azure
obtained at Pricing Overview. or on premise.
 Because of above size constraints,
Note: When you reach the allocated level (1 one of the recommendations is to
GB or 10 GB), only SELECTs and partition the data across databases.
Creating multiple databases will
DELETEs will be supported. UPDATEs and allow you take maximum
INSERTs will throw an error. advantage of the computing power
of multiple nodes. The biggest
value in the Azure model is the
elasticity of being able to create as
many databases as you need, when
your demand peaks and
delete/drop the databases as your
demand subsides. The biggest
challenge is writing the
application to scale across
multiple databases. Once this is
achieved, the logic can be
extended to scale across N number
of databases.
Edition  Express  Enterprise Edition
 Workgroup
 Standard
 Enterprise
Connectivity  SQL Server  SQL Server 2008 R2 Management
Management Studio provides complete connectivity
Studio to SQL azure. Prior versions have
 SQLCMD limited support.
 SQLCMD
Data Migration  SQL Server Integration Services, BCP
and SqlBulkCopyAPI are supported
Authentication  SQL  SQL Server Authentication only Use SQL Server authentication
Authentication
 Windows
Authentication
Schema No such limitation SQL Azure does not support heaps. ALL Check all scripts to make sure all table
tables must have a clustered index before creation scripts include clustered index.
data can be inserted.

TSQL Certain TSQL commands are fully

Supportability supported; some are partially supported
while others are unsupported.

 Supported TSQL:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ee336270.aspx
 Partially Supported TSQL:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ee336267.aspx
 Unsupported TSQL:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ee336253.aspx

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Feature SQL Server SQL Azure Mitigation
(On-premise)

“USE” Supported Not supported USE command is not supported

command because each of the databases created
by the user may not be on the same
physical server. So the application has
to retrieve data separately from
multiple databases and consolidate at
the application level.

Transactional Supported Not supported You can use BCP or SSIS to get the
Replication data out on-demand into an on premise
SQL Server. You can also use the SQL
Data Sync tool to keep on-premise SQL
Server and SQL Azure in sync.

Log Shipping Supported Not supported

Database Supported Not supported

Mirroring

SQL Agent Supported Cannot run SQL agent/jobs on SQL Azure You can run SQL agent on on-premise
SQL Server and connect to SQL Azure

Server options Supported  Some system views are supported The idea is most system level metadata
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- is disabled as it does not make sense in
us/library/ee336238.aspx) a cloud model to expose server level
information

Connection N/A To provide fair usage experience to all

Limitations tenants on the nodes, connections to service
may be closed due to one of the following
situations:

 Excessive resource usage

 Long running queries – (over 5
minutes)
 Long running single transactions
between BEGIN TRAN and END
TRAN – (over 5 minutes)
 Idle Connections – (over 30 minutes)

SSIS Can run SSIS on- Cannot run SSIS in SQL Azure Run SSIS on site and connect to SQL
premise Azure with ADO.NET provider

References:
 SQL Azure Portal
 SQL Azure Developer Center

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  SQL Azure Team Blog