Azure SQL Data Warehouse Compared to SQL Server

Azure SQL Data Warehouse will be a scalable, high-performance business intelligence (BI) data repository as a service based on SQL Server, but it has benefits and disadvantages as compared to using SQL Server for similar workloads on-premises.

Benefits include the following:

Azure scalable benefits. Customers of the service can benefit from cost elasticity to meet periodic, transitional, or seasonal workloads. Customers can scale computing resources to meet business requirements, enabling them to maximize the relationship between their expenditures and workload demands.

Ease of management. Microsoft manages and updates the underlying servers, OSs, and SQL Server software, which removes most of the overhead associated with installation and maintenance of the host OSs and server applications, and customers are responsible only for the database management.

Availability and disaster recovery. SQL Data Warehouse includes automated high availability with three redundant copies of the data in the same data center and an additional three copies in a remote Azure data center. Automated backups are performed every four hours and maintained for seven days, although customers can choose different retention values to meet their specific needs.