Azure SQL Database is a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) database engine that handles most of the database management functions such as upgrading, patching, backups, and monitoring without user involvement.Azure SQL Database is always running on the latest stable version of the SQL Server database engine and patched OS with 99.99% availability. PaaS capabilities that are built into Azure SQL Database enable you to focus on the domain-specific database administration and optimization activities that are critical for your business.

Amazon Aurora Serverless is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration for Amazon Aurora. It automatically starts up, shuts down, and scales capacity up or down based on your application's needs. It enables you to run your database in the cloud without managing any database capacity.

With Aurora Serverless, you simply create a database endpoint, optionally specify the desired database capacity range, and connect your applications. You pay on a per-second basis for the database capacity you use when the database is active, and migrate between standard and serverless configurations with a few clicks in the Amazon RDS Management Console.

Has a vCore-based purchase model, for those who look for flexibility, control and transparency of individual resource consumption.

$0.5218 vCore-hour rate.

$0.12 per GB-monthly in Locally Redundant Storage.

Backup storage and long term retention have varying prices.

Example Price

10 vCores ($5,218) with 10GB of storage ($1,2) alongside 10GB of LRS storage and retention ($1+$0,25) $7,668 USD

A wide variety of payment methods exist, with the smallest database starting at an upfront $243, or $24.82 monthly for a year.

Onboarding
Massive documentation, free to start. Might be a bit overwhelming at first.

​Scalability
Configurable autoscaling.

Regions

Azure SQL Database is available on all the platforms that have Azure available, such as the United States, Europe, Asia Pacific, and more to come.

​Backups 
With Azure SQL Database, you can set a long-term backup retention policy (LTR) to automatically retain backups in separate Azure Blob storage containers for up to 10 years. You can then recover a database using these backups using the Azure portal or PowerShell.

​Security
​Supports JWT, ABAC-based role, and permissions. Identity and anonymous-base

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Onboarding
Good documentation that includes tutorials.

Scalability
On-demand auto scaling configuration, sharding.

Regions
US, Africa, Asia Pacific, China, South America, Middle East and Europe. The support varies across specific versions of each database engine, and across AWS Regions.

 
Backups 
Aurora backs up your cluster volume automatically and retains restore data for the length of the backup retention period. You can specify a backup retention period, from 1 to 35 days, when you create or modify a DB cluster.  Aurora backups are stored in Amazon S3.

Security
By default, Aurora Serverless v1 uses the Transport Layer Security/Secure Sockets Layer (TLS/SSL) protocol to encrypt communications between clients and your Aurora Serverless v1 DB cluster. It supports TLS/SSL versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2.

With Azure SQL Database, you can create a highly available and high-performance data storage layer for the applications and solutions in Azure. SQL Database can be the right choice for a variety of modern cloud applications because it enables you to process both relational data and non-relational structures, such as graphs, JSON, spatial, and XML.

• ​Fully managed SQL database automates updates, provisioning, and backups so you can focus on application development
  
• Flexible and responsive serverless compute and Hyperscale storage rapidly adapt to your changing requirements
  
• Layers of protection, built-in controls, and intelligent threat detection keep your data secure
  
• Built-in AI and built-in high availability maintain peak performance and durability with an SLA of up to 99.995 percent
  

• Compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL
  
• High-performance storage subsystem
  
• Automates and standardizes database clustering and replication
• Supports the full breadth of Aurora features, including Global Database, Multi-AZ deployments, and read replicas.
  
• Takes advantage of the familiar Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) features for management and administration.