Comparing Azure SQL PaaS Storage Types and Limits

Azure’s SQL Server PaaS offerings, Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance, offer different features, performance, capacity, and cost. However, they have similarities, including their use of storage solutions for the primary database, backups, replicas, long-term retention, and temporary storage. This chart compares capacities, limits, and storage types of the services and their tiers.

Azure SQL Database

Azure SQL Database supports deployment of stand-alone databases. It supports most of SQL Server’s database management features but has a longer list of unsupported features than SQL Managed Instance. Azure SQL Database is available in single database and elastic pool deployment models, which provide similar performance tiers. They can be purchased by capacity tier. (An older tier structure, referred to as Database Throughput Units [DTUs], is not included in the chart, as storage limits are not configurable and storage cost is primarily covered with compute costs.)