If you have a large relational database and it is growing fast on daily basis, and if you have a strong need in ACID across all your clusters, and most importantly, if you need to maintain high availability in a large region, Google Cloud Spanner can be a very good choice.
Your upcoming app can be built faster on a fully managed SQL database and can be moved into Azure with a few to no application code changes. Flexible and responsive server less computing and Hyperscale storage can cope with your changing requirements and one of the main benefits is the reduction in costs, which is noticeable.
Scalability is #1: if it used to be an almost no-win endeavour to try to modernize your server or migrate to other hardware, with Azure SQL Database it becomes a press of a button.
All the tools simply work after you are on Azure SQL Database.
The applications do not need changes in order to start using Azure SQL Database.
Hybrid Cloud scenarios will work.
Clustering and failover - already there.
You can start monitoring the use and extract performance insights in a new way in Azure.
A little slow on processing complex or large Views. We use a lot of Views to feed our BI system, and the processing time could see some improvement, IMHO.
Additional monitoring components would be nice too, automating some built in performance measurement tools would be a nice feature.
Price can always be improved as well. It’s not bad, but room for improvement.
We give the support a high rating simply because every time we've had issues or questions, representatives were in contact with us quickly. Without fail, our issues/questions were handled in a timely matter. That kind of response is integral when client data integrity and availability is in question. There is also a wealth of documentation for resolving issues on your own.
Spanner scales quickly compared to Amazon RDS. Azure Database is about the same as well. MongoDB can scale to horizontal scalability, however, because Mongo doesn't support full ACID, Spanner comes into that aspect. GCP Cloud SQL not as scalable as Spanner. Spanner has more functionality than MongoDB and Amazon RDS & Azure Databases.
Oracle Database is "the" serious database. There really is no competition in that field. SQL Database would be a serious competitor through the ease of implementation and the "no maintenance," but since it's too expensive for "normal" use (medium to small applications), it just priced itself out of the market, so to speak. Nevertheless, we do have 2 or 3 large applications that are highly integrated in azure, and for those it's just too easy to use SQL Database instead of the on premise Oracle Database with VPN gateways etcetera.
We don't need a dedicated SQL dba because so many of the database maintenance operations are managed. A huge positive not only in budget but time constraints.
The ability to scale quickly is the biggest positive as our data needs change constantly.
Easy to migrate from legacy tools and systems, saving us on the need for redevelopment.
