Licensing the SQL Azure Cloud Database

SQL Azure Database, part of the Windows Azure platform, provides a relational database service hosted in Microsoft’s data centers. While SQL Azure offers many of the same database features and APIs as the on-premises SQL Server product, it lacks business intelligence features such as SQL Server’s Reporting Services, Analysis Services, and a number of other capabilities, such as support for Windows Authentication.

Developing database applications that run on SQL Azure is very similar to developing for SQL Server, so most existing code can be ported to SQL Azure with modest effort. However, to date, none of the approximately two dozen Microsoft products that have SQL Server as a prerequisite are able to use SQL Azure instead of SQL Server, leaving custom applications as the main target for SQL Azure.

SQL Azure pricing is based on the storage space used and data sent into and out of the Azure data center. Space usage is divided into the following tiers:

• 0GB to 1GB: US$9.99 per month