single database shared Azure SQL Server

1
votes

Going through the pricing calculator and also from the azure management portal: it's not immediately evident what the cheapest options are for a single SQL database.

I'm looking at transferring a customers MVC5 site from shared hosting to azure.

Am I right that the lowest level SQL server offering for an azure website is basic SQL server?

Or can I use localdb or sqlexpress or deploy to a shared SQL server. The database offering doesn't really need to provide more than localdb or SQL express.

Update I tried publishing the default MVC template to Azure but the database connection didn't work (when you register a user). These conflicting articles imply localdb isn't supported and is supported

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azureazure-sql-databaseazure-web-app-service
Your link that localdb "is supported" isn't correct, if you look carefully in the example the database is a SQL Azure database. During the publish, a SQL Azure database is selected. See the screenshots for the servername (Deploy the App to Azure, step 3) – Erik Oppedijk

1 Answers

1
votes

The cheapest offering at the moment is £4 a month for a database up to 2GB on Windows Azure SQL Database. This is a "Basic" tier database which means you won't get anywhere near the performance of an on-premise database, though you still get a 99.99% Uptime SLA and Point in Time Restore up to 7 days in the past.

Source Article

For reference; we use a Standard Tier - S1 level database which provides greater performance for our web application at £20 a month along with the addition of passive geo-replication (in case of serious data center failure, you don't control the failover for this level of replication).

You could always self host SQL Server on a Azure VM (not cheap and you'd have to have 2x instances to get the SLA for VMs) or alternatively point to an AWS database (though that incurs higher latency as the database exists in a different data center).

Alternatively you could host the website and an SQL Express instance on an Azure VM yourself, then it would act in the same way as your development environment