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 ......................................................................................................................... 6
Scalability .................................................................................................................................. 6
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.

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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 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.

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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.

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

such • Business Edition created where older data can
Exact size and pricing information can be migrated to another
be obtained at Pricing Overview. database in SQL Azure or on
premise.
Note: When you reach the allocated • Because of above size
level (1 GB or 10 GB), only SELECTs constraints, one of the
recommendations is to partition
and DELETEs will be supported. the data across databases.
UPDATEs and INSERTs will throw an Creating multiple databases
error. will allow you take maximum
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
Studio connectivity to SQL azure. Prior
• SQLCMD versions have 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
tables must have a clustered index table creation scripts include
before data can be inserted. clustered index.

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

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Feature SQL Server SQL Azure Mitigation
(On-premise)

• Unsupported TSQL:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ee336253.aspx

“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
Replication the 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 You can run SQL agent on on-
Azure premise SQL Server and connect to
SQL Azure

Server options Supported • Some system views are supported The idea is most system level
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- metadata is disabled as it does not
us/library/ee336238.aspx) make sense in 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
premise SQL Azure with ADO.NET provider

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References:
• SQL Azure Portal
• SQL Azure Developer Center
• SQL Azure Team Blog