A Closer Look at the Premium Offer for Windows Azure SQL Database
As part of the main keynote yesterday at the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Houston, Texas, Satya Nadella, Server and Tools President, discussed partner and customer innovations around modern business applications built with the Windows Azure platform. As part of this cloud momentum, Satya announced a new Premium offer for Windows Azure SQL Database that delivers more predictable performance. With the limited preview for this new Premium database offer coming in a few weeks, we wanted to take a closer look at the additional value SQL Database will deliver.
This new capability enables both customers and Service Integrator (SI), ISV, and CSV partners to raise the bar on the types of modern business application services and products they can build and offer to customers. The Premium offer for Windows Azure SQL Database will help deliver more powerful and predictable performance for cloud applications by dedicating a fixed amount of reserved capacity for a database including its built-in secondary replicas. Reserved capacity is ideal for cloud-based applications with the following requirements:
- Sustained resource demand
- Many concurrent requests
- Predictable latency
As part of our product testing, customers with business-critical cloud applications are already experiencing tremendous value from using the Premium offer with reserved capacity:
- MYOB: “The Premium offer from Windows Azure SQL Database plays a valuable role in MYOB’s cloud solutions offering. We moved across only a few weeks ago and are already enjoying the benefits of a more insulated infrastructure environment. Our many AccountRight Live clients rely on Windows Azure, where the reservation service sits, as the first step in accessing the cloud file that stores their critical business financial data. It supports significant traffic – our clients log in thousands of times each day.” James Scollay – MYOB GM, Business Division
- easyJet: “We use Windows Azure SQL Database for our seating selection tool online at easyJet. The reserved capacity with the new SQL Database Premium offer has enabled us to add an extra facet of performance predictability during important periods of peak workload where customer demands are high. This reliable, business-grade solution has also allowed us to gather telemetry against a known, fixed resource so we can better benchmark and capacity plan our solutions moving forward.” Bert Craven, Enterprise Architect Manager
Initially, we will offer two reservation sizes: P1 and P2. P1 offers better performance predictability than the SQL Database Web and Business editions, and P2 offers roughly twice the performance of P1 and is suitable for applications with greater peaks and sustained workload demands. Premium database are billed based on the Premium database reservation size and storage volume of the database.
Premium Database:
Premium DB size
Preview price
GA price
P1
(1 core, 8GB RAM)$15/day
(~$465/month)$30/day
(~930/month)P2
(2 cores, 16GB RAM)$30/day
(~$930/month)$60/day
(~1860/month)Storage: $0.095 per GB per month (prorated daily)
If you are as excited as we are and want a heads up when the preview is available, sign up for Microsoft Cloud OS Bits Alert—we’ll send you an email when signups can begin! Preview is initially limited and subscriptions on a free trial are not eligible for a Premium database.
Also, if you haven’t tried Windows Azure SQL Database yet, it’s a great time to start! Learn more today!
