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Online Relational Database Service Offers

This brief post will present a 30,000 foot view of the two behemoth online relational database service providers, Microsoft and Amazon. At the end, I'll give you my favorite pick. 
Microsoft Azure SQL Database 
Right now you can get a free Azure account with $200 in credits to be used toward any Azure product during your first 30 days. After the first month, you can continue to use free Azure products, provided you upgrade your account and remove the spending limit. With a free account, you currently get 12 months of free access to SQL Database. According to the Microsoft rep I spoke with, this includes "250 GB of SQL Database standard S0 instance with 10 database transaction units". Microsoft bases SQL DB package pricing ("Service Tiers")  on Elastic Database Transaction Units (eDTUs). They've provided a handy calculator to help you figure out how much you might need to shuck out.  

Amazon RDS appears to give you more options as far as the database engine. While Microsoft obviously offers SQL Server, that appears to be about it. Amazon offers Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. However, Amazon's current promotion falls short of Microsoft. With the AWS (Basically Amazon's version of Azure) Free Tier, which lasts 12 months, you can get 750 instance hrs/month, 20 GB of general purpose storage and 20 GB of backup storage. The Amazon Aurora database engine is not available on the free tier. Anything beyond these limits and you will be charged differently based on what database engine you are using. There are on-demand pricing plans and reserved-instance plans. They also have a calculator. 

If you just want to use MS SQL Server, Microsoft Azure is my go-to pick because of the amount of free stuff they put at your disposal. However, if you need more flexibility, Amazon RDS may be the way you need to go. 

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