Tag Archives: Azure SQL Database Reserved Capacity

Azure SQL Database failover rights

Microsoft add new failover rights for Azure SQL Database to the December 2023 Product Terms. Now, when a secondary database replica is used only for disaster recovery, and doesn’t have any workloads running on it or applications connecting to it, you can save on licensing costs by designating the database as a standby replica. Microsoft provide you with the number of vCores licensed in the primary database at no extra charge, but you’re still billed for the compute and storage that the secondary database uses.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/4b6kRKK, the relevant part of the Product Terms here: https://bit.ly/3Y6xsac, and instructions for configuring the standby replica here: https://bit.ly/3HxEzlc.

How Azure Reservations work with Azure SQL Database

Azure Reservations for the Azure SQL Database service became available earlier in August 2018 (see our blog post here: http://bit.ly/2KROzpp). If you want to understand more about how the reservation discount is applied automatically to running Azure SQL Databases then this is a useful article: http://bit.ly/2vX61UR.

Azure SQL Database Reserved Capacity

Microsoft announce the General Availability of Azure SQL Database Reserved Capacity for single and elastic pool databases. If you’re familiar with Reserved Instances for virtual machines, then this is the same kind of thing for the Azure SQL Database service. Essentially, you can save money by prepaying for SQL Database vCores for a one or three-year term. In addition, you can bring your own SQL Server licences (either via active SA or the new Server Subscriptions) for an even more cost-effective solution.

SQL Database Reserved Capacity shares other similarities with Reserved Instances too: a Reservation can be assigned to either a single Azure Subscription or shared, and there’s vCore Size Flexibility as well where the Reservation can be applied dynamically to any databases and elastic pools within a performance tier and region.

To find out more, find the Microsoft announcement here: http://bit.ly/2vJP2oZ and information on how to buy Reservations here: http://bit.ly/2P8Pjdp.