SQL Azure Raises The Bar On Cloud Databases

Over the past six months, Forrester interviewed 26 companies using Microsoft SQL Azure to find out about their implementations. Most customers stated that SQL Azure delivers a reliable cloud database platform to support various small to moderately sized applications as well as other data management requirements such as backup, disaster recovery, testing, and collaboration. Unlike other DBMS vendors such as IBM, Oracle, and Sybase that offer public cloud database largely using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) platform, Microsoft SQL Azure is unique because of its multitenant architecture, which allows it to offer greater economies of scale and increased ease of use. Although SQL Azure currently has a 50 GB database size limit (which might increase in the near future), a few companies are already using data sharding with SQL Azure to scale their databases into hundreds of gigabytes. Application developers and database administrators seeking a cloud database will find that SQL Azure offers a reliable and cost-effective platform to build and deploy small to moderately sized applications.