SQL Azure for extremely large databases

In a scenario with a database containing hundreds of millions of rows and reaching sizes of 500GB with maybe ~20 users. Mostly it's data storage for ag开发者_如何学Pythongregated data to be reported on later.

Would SQL Azure be able to handle this scenario? If so, does it make sense to go that route? Compared to purchasing and housing 2+ high end servers ($15k-$20k each) in a co-location facility + all maintenance and backups.

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Did you consider using the Azure Table storage? Azure Tables do not have referential integrity, but if you are simply storing many rows, is that an option for you? You could use SQL Azure for your transactional needs, and use Azure Tables for those tables that do not fit in SQL Azure. Also, Azure Tables will be cheaper.

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SQL Azure databases are limited to 50Gb (at the moment)

As described in the General Guidelines and Limitations

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I don't know whether SQL Azure is able to handle your scenario - 500GB seems a lot and does not figure in the pricing list (50GB max). I'm just trying to give perspective about the pricing.

Official pricing of SQL Azure is around 10$ a GB/month ( http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/)

Therefore, 500 GB would be around 5k $ each month roughly. 2 high-end servers (without license fees, maintenance and backups) of 20k take about 8 months to pay off.

Or, from an other point of view: Assuming you change your servers every 4 years, does the budget of 240k $ (5k $ * 48 months) cover the hardware, installation/configuration, licence fees and maintenance costs? (Not counting bandwidth and backup since you'll pay that extra too when using SQL Azure).

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One option would be to use SQL Azure sharding. This is a way to spread the data over multiple SQL Azure databases and has the advantage that each database would use a different CPU & hard drive (since each db is actually stored on a different machine in the data center) which should give you really good performance. Of course, this is under the assumption that your database has the possibility of being sharded. There is some more info on this sharding here.