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.
"The solution is scalable and can be configured with AWS Secrets Manager."
"One of the most valuable features is that it is serverless, so we don't have to worry about scaling."
"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."
"Encryption is the most valuable feature."
"It makes it easy to administer the database. It helps to scale your database by providing Read Replicas, which reduce transaction time. It is highly available and durable which helps in disaster recovery and management."
"Being able to change the size of an RDS MySQL instance is amazing."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon RDS is its performance."
"The most valuable features of Amazon RDS are its scalability, reliability, and intelligence."
"The most valuable feature of SQL Azure is centralized authentication because I'm using the domain, user name, and password, for Microsoft 365 account with multifactor authentication and the security has been working well."
"The product is quite stable. The performance is great and it's reliable."
"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."
"Customers can benefit from a lot of cost savings if they go for Azure."
"Database services and Active Directory related functions for this solution are good. Stable, scalable, and easy to install. Its technical support is good."
"The dashboard is valuable."
"What I like the most is the processes and the easiness of deployments."
"Emergency mode is quite useful."
"The security features could be improved."
"You can only get access from the sales support. That means if you want to buy something or renew your subscription or upgrade, all these services are easily available. Yet, if you would like to get some technical support, you have to pay for it. You have to pay for an additional subscription."
"When you are using it for the first time, it is a little bit hard to configure. The first-time configuration is not very easy. It should be easier to configure. Its installation should also be simpler. Currently, its installation is very complex. With SQL Server, we have access to the SQL Server analysis services and reporting services, but such services are not available with Amazon RDS."
"If we do not keep track of our costs, we might face some problems."
"The only thing that needs improvement would be the pricing of the solution."
"The solution could improve by adding a sandbox environment and more security."
"Currently, speaking of Microsoft SQL on RDS, you don't have a full option to be able to use it directly on RDS. So, it needs improvement."
"One of the challenges of AWS RDS is that it doesn't support performance insight. So we need to write our own script or use third-party tools."
"It can have more dashboards for monitoring, which would naturally help a lot. Other than that, everything is okay."
"The solution can be improved by reducing the constraints available."
"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."
"The solution lacks feedback tools."
"Its compatibility with existing applications can be improved. Its compatibility is currently a little bit imbalanced."
"There are certain shortcomings when it comes to the stability of the product, especially if I consider the fact that there can always be some bug-related issues in the tool."
"Their support is nice but their responses aren't effective."
"The management is entirely controlled by Microsoft, so there are some restrictions."
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 Google Cloud SQL, MongoDB Atlas, 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.
