Getting To Know SQL Azure Vs. SQL Server

Getting To Know SQL Azure Vs. SQL Server

As such there is no clear distinction between SQL Azure and SQL server. Instead, Microsoft Azure makes things easy and gives us two options for hosting the SQL server workloads.
i) Azure SQL Database: This gives full compatibility with SQL Server features. It is related to the cloud and is also known as platform as a service (Paas).
ii) SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines: This is another form where there is a virtual machine running on Azure known as Infrastructure as a service, and here the SQL server is installed and hosted on the cloud, on these VMs. Again, this gives SQL server support and full support of SQL server and windows.
Now based on this knowledge and with your specific requirements you can choose your preference. Now finally, to make things simple
i) Azure SQL database should be used by a beginner, who is making a cloud-based application to save cost and wants to optimize performance.
ii) SQL Server on Azure VMs should be used if an existing application needs to be migrated to a cloud, and a large (about 1TB) Enterprise is expected. This approach is simple, minimizes cost and optimizes performance for existing applications.