We performed a comparison between Amazon RDS and SQL Azure based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, SQL Azure nudges slightly ahead of Amazon RDS. SQL Azure is part of the Microsoft Azure ecosystem and offers huge benefits to Microsoft / Microsoft Azure, users which represents tremendous cost savings, great security, and seamless integrations with most Microsoft products.
"It is very easy to set up initially."
"Amazon RDS is lightweight and flexible."
"I use Amazon RDS to store and manage data securely. It helps me retrieve information and gain insights from the data that comes in for my business or specific applications."
"Amazon RDS is easy to maintain and easy to deploy."
"The most valuable aspect of Amazon RDS is it is on the cloud."
"It is stable, scalable, and easy to deploy."
"For me, RDS is a great solution. I like that Amazon RDS is a very simple solution to implement and to start using."
"Amazon RDS is a scalable solution."
"The stability is good."
"Cost savings are the most valuable. The DR/high availability is also valuable. The failover group with the built-in DR/high availability features is probably one of the easiest things."
"The most valuable feature is PolyBase."
"The hardware is all managed by Microsoft."
"We're a Microsoft customer, so it fits in with everything else we work with."
"Its technical support team is good."
"The initial setup was straightforward. Deployment takes about one hour."
"It's easy to use in terms of their portal, which is very nicely organized."
"I feel Amazon RDS should have a lot of functionalities to make monitoring within the database easier."
"A lot of the features are disabled by default. The solution should enable more features. I understand this could cause challenges to management for many clients using RDS, however."
"I would like to see improvements in the tool's automatic restart."
"It would be helpful if they made it easier to migrate from an existing on-premises solution to the cloud-based service."
"If we do not keep track of our costs, we might face some problems."
"The solution's version upgrade and performance could be improved."
"The product should support new databases."
"There are a few aspects of database management that have room for improvement. There are a few parameters in the solution that are a bit unclear at our end as it's not understandable."
"If the product could support applications requiring an SQL server for installation, by using SQL Azure as a backend, that would be useful."
"It would help if the solution was more secure."
"It's very difficult to investigate if something wrong is going on behind the scenes. If we are facing a problem that our application is doing a CPU spike and when we look at the dump of the details, the processes that our application is generating are not consuming more than 40-50% of CPU. But we don’t know where it is going, who's generating it, and who's consuming the CPU. Even Microsoft says they don’t know."
"I want the pricing to be improved."
"The solution’s visibility could be improved."
"The solution needs to improve its customer network, including its online support."
"The solution can be improved by reducing the constraints available."
"I think that the cost management in SQL is not clear because we may use some tax to identify products, but in some cases identifying the transactions in SQL is not easy for some financial cost centers."
Amazon RDS is ranked 1st in Database as a Service with 45 reviews while SQL Azure is ranked 2nd in Database as a Service with 90 reviews. Amazon RDS is rated 8.4, while SQL Azure is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Amazon RDS writes "Provides excellent authentication, authorization, integration, data protection, and autoscaling features". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SQL Azure writes "The SQL connector effectively syncs data to databases". Amazon RDS is most compared with MongoDB Atlas, Google Cloud SQL, Oracle Database as a Service, Google Cloud Spanner and Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer, whereas SQL Azure is most compared with Google Cloud SQL, MongoDB Atlas, Oracle Database as a Service, Google Cloud Spanner and IBM Db2 on Cloud. See our Amazon RDS vs. SQL Azure report.
See our list of best Database as a Service vendors.
We monitor all Database as a Service reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
