SQL Azure Pricing Provides Flexibility

New pricing was announced at Tech-Ed for pricing of SQL Azure.

SQL Azure today offers two editions with a ceiling of 1GB for web edition and 10GB for business edition. With our next service release. Ceiling sizes for both web and business editions will increase 5x.

Even though both editions can now support larger ceiling sizes (web up to 5GB and business up to 50GB), you will be billed based on the peak db size in a day rolled up to the next billing increment.

• Web edition will support 1GB and 5GB as billing increments.
• Business edition will support 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50GB as billing increment.

Even though both editions can grow to larger ceiling sizes (such as 50GB), you can cap the data size per database and control your bill at the billing increments. MAXSIZE option for CREATE/ALTER DATABASE will help set the cap on the size of the database. If the size of your database reaches to the cap set by MAXSIZE, you will receive an error code 40544. You will only be billed for the MAXSIZE amount for the day. When database reaches the MAXSIZE limit, you cannot insert or update data, or create new objects, such as tables, stored procedures, views, and functions. However, you can still read and delete data, truncate tables, drop tables and indexes, and rebuild indexes.

For details about the pricing and an example how to set MAXSIZE, see Pricing for the New Large SQL Azure Databases Explained.

Bruce D. KyleISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation