The number of Microsoft’s cloud services is growing by month, if not week, so that it’s hard to keep them all in mind and understand what exactly is each one for and when to use waht. This article is a summary of the Data Service as of April 2015. I’ll describe main characteristics of each service and scenarios in which we will use them.
We can group all current data services into following groups:
- Relation Databases: SQL Server in a virtual machine (IaaS), SQL Database (PaaS)
- NoSQL Databases: DocumentDB, Table Storage
- BLOB Storage
- File system storage: Files, Disks
- Other Data Services: Cache, Queue Storage, StorSimple
RELATIONAL DATABASES
There are currently two flavors of SQL Server in Azure:
- Traditional SQL Server, also described as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Hosted in a Virtual Machine
- Full SQL Server functionality
- Windows and SQL authentication
- Unlimited number of databases
- Maximal database size: up to 16 TB
- HA/DR managed by user
- Azure SQL Database, Platform as a Service (PaaS).
- Relational Data Storage as a Service
- Nearly Complete Database Engine, but no SSIS, SSRS, SSAS
- SQL authentication only
- A single database
- Maximal database size: 500 GB
- HA/DR automatic by default
NoSQL DATABASES
- DocumentDB
- Stores JSON-formatted data
- Natively supports JavaScript
- Document-oriented SQL queries
- SDKs and REST APIs for many technolgies
- Table Storage
- Blob Storage
FILE SYSTEM STORAGE
- File Storage
- Disks
OTHER DATA SERVICES
- Redis-Cache
- Queue Storage
- StorSimple
