This Azure tutorial will discuss the critical differences between the Azure SQL Database standard vs premium, Azure SQL Database service tiers, etc.
Azure SQL Standard vs Premium
Let’s discuss the Azure SQL premium vs standard versions.
| Azure SQL Standard | Azure SQL Premium |
| An excellent option to start with cloud-designed business applications. | Meant for mission-critical databases and high transactional volume applications. |
| Provides middle-level performance. | Provides high performance. |
| It has access to business continuity features. | It has access to advanced business continuity features. |
| Transaction rates per minute. | Transaction rates per second. |
Which Azure SQL database service tier provides the fastest recovery time for a database?
Answer: Hyperscale service tier
Azure SQL Database service tiers
There are two service tires for Azure SQL Database and SQL Managed Instance
- General Purpose
- Business Critical
General Purpose
The General Purpose service tier architecture is based on separating compute and Azure storage.
This service model guarantees no data loss in case of infrastructure failure.
There are two layers in the case of general-purpose service tier
1- A stateless compute layer that is running the sqlservr.exe process
2- A stateful data layer with database files that are stored in Azure Blob storage
Azure Service Fabric will move the stateless process to another stateless compute node in case of infrastructure failure. There are different sets of buffer nodes available to run the new compute service in case any failure happens
This process guarantees 99.99% availability.
Business Critical
The Business Critical service tier is based on a cluster of database engine processes.
This architecture model will ensure that there is always a quorum of available database engine nodes and has very little performance impact on your workload, even during maintenance activities.
Business Critical service tiers are designed for very intensive workload support even in case of any ongoing maintenance operations.
In this model, compute and storage are integrated on a single node, and replication of compute and storage is deployed to a four-node cluster.
In this case, the primary node pushes the changes to the secondary nodes to ensure that the data is available on secondary replicas if, by chance, the primary node fails for any infrastructure failure.
How to Choose the Right Service Tier
When creating an Azure SQL database, the first thing that will come to your mind is which service tier to choose.
Commonly, everyone will look for the service tier one that will be very cheap.
Choosing the right Azure SQL database service tier is not straightforward.
This depends on several factors: your budget?, Do you have any special re