Better Density and Lower Prices for Azure’s SQL Elastic Database Pools

A few weeks ago, we announced the preview availability of the new Basic and Premium Elastic Database Pools Tiers with our Azure SQL Database service.  Elastic Database Pools enable you to run multiple, isolated and independent databases that can be auto-scaled automatically across a private pool of resources dedicated to just you and your apps.  This provides a great way for software-as-a-service (SaaS) developers to better isolate their individual customers in an economical way.

Today, we are announcing some nice changes to the pricing structure of Elastic Database Pools as well as changes to the density of elastic databases within a pool.  These changes make it even more attractive to use Elastic Database Pools to build your applications.

Specifically, we are making the following changes:

  • Finalizing the eDTU price – With Elastic Database Pools you purchase units of capacity that we can call eDTUs – which you can then use to run multiple databases within a pool.  We have decided to not increase the price of eDTUs as we go from preview->GA.  This means that you’ll be able to pay a much lower price (about 50% less) for eDTUs than many developers expected.
  • Eliminating the per-database fee – In additional to lower eDTU prices, we are also eliminating the fee per database that we have had with the preview. This means you no longer need to pay a per-database charge to use an Elastic Database Pool, and makes the pricing much more attractive for scenarios where you want to have lots of small databases.
  • Pool density – We are announcing increased density limits that enable you to run many more databases per Elastic Database pool. See the chart below under “Maximum databases per pool” for specifics. This change will take effect at the time of general availability, but you can design your apps around these numbers.  The increase pool density limits will make Elastic Database Pools event more attractive.

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Below are the updated parameters for each of the Elastic Database Pool options with these new changes:

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For more information about Azure SQL Database Elastic Database Pools and Management tools go the technical overview here.

Hope this helps,

Scott

5 Comments

  • Great! This is going in the right direction. Now if you could just lower the eDTU range per pool to start at 50 (or even lower!) it would convince me to switch to use an Elastic Pool.
    The price of 50 eDTUs is just a little bit more than one A1 Windows VM. My A1 VM can host lots of small databases in SQL Express. But I'm willing to pay a little bit more for a SQL Azure Elastic Pool. Because I know it has lots of advantages and extras over SQL Express.

    The 100 eDTU minimum right now is just too much. All my small databases together don't need more than 30 eDTUs.

  • Yes but with your only A1, you don't have any fault tolerance. ;)

  • This makes the elastic pools much more attractive. But what I still do not unterstand, is why the pool size is still linked directly to the available DTUs.

    a combined pool of 100 or 200 DTUs would be enough for our customer databases, but a combined 100 or 200 GB database size would be more of a problem (when even the small S0 Database can be 250 GB in size)

    Something like 2 or 2.5 GB storage per eDTU would make much more sense to me (for the standard pool).

    Or am I missing something?

  • Thats true 2 or 2.5 GB storage per eDTU would make Elastic Pool a good choice

  • By $149/month, Can I use 500's Azure SQL Database's databases in one Azure SQL Database Elastic Pool instance in GA ?
    Our customers uses a lot of small databases which are so little performance usually.

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