What is data?
A collection of unique, compact pieces of information is called data. It can be utilized in many different ways, including text, numbers, media, bytes, etc. It may be kept on paper, in electronic memory, etc.
The word "data" comes from the Latin word "datum," which means "a single piece of information." It is the word datum's plural.
Data is information that can be transformed into a form for swift movement and processing in computing. Data can be swapped out.
What is a database?
A database is a set of data that has been arranged for easy access and management. To make it simpler to access important information, you can organize data into tables, rows, and columns and index it. Database administrators build a database such that all users can access the data through a single set of tools.
By storing, retrieving, and managing data, the database's primary function is to manage a significant volume of information.
These days, the World Wide Web has a large number of dynamic websites that use databases to manage their content. As an illustration, consider a hotel room availability checking model. It serves as an illustration of a dynamic website utilizing a database.
Customer Introduction
The customer is a B2B e-commerce. Just 2 years after its founding, Customer had linked more than 1000 sellers in 10 cities with 5000 suppliers. Now, customers include 30,000 suppliers, and many fledgling entrepreneurs cite the company as the reason they made the plunge.
Customer e-commerce technology gave sellers a way to expand their inventory options and kickstart productivity. The company built centralized warehouses to relieve wholesalers of inventory management burdens and make it easy for MSME business owners to stock their shelves with more options. And with affordable financing from customers, those business owners have new growth opportunities. Key to making it all come together? Information is delivered at scale with SQL Database and Azure storage technologies.
Challenges
The customer is a new start-up and doesn’t have any technologies running.
They don’t want to invest too much money in the Physical data center.
Requirements
Adopt the Azure Cloud as soon as possible.
Have scalability and performance at the Platform Level.
Options to have application modernization and Database modernization.
The minimum overhead of managing and maintaining the services.
Cost Optimization
Customer Solution
Customers adopted Azure from the beginning, enjoying the scalability and performance offered by the platform. The customer team naturally turned to SQL Database for its stellar service-level agreements (SLAs) of up to 99.995 percent and out-of-the-box capabilities. It’s a fully managed SQL database that takes maintenance tasks away from busy IT teams. “The SLAs offered by Azure SQL Database were very enticing for the customer. The business-critical tier of SQL Database delivers a 99.995 percent SLA, or up to 4.32 seconds of downtime per day, which is low.
Using the toolset makes it easy for them to horizontally scale Azure SQL Database with an auto-pause feature. Usage is charged by second rather than hour, making it easy for the customer team to optimize costs
The customer chose Azure SQL Database serverless for one of our databases so that we can use the auto-pause feature to suspend processing at night when it’s not needed for that application. That option delivers huge cost reductions for customers.
Business Motivations
Both platforms as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) options include a base price that covers underlying infrastructure and licensing. However, with the IaaS option you need to invest additional time and resources to manage your database, while in PaaS you get these administration features included in the price. IaaS enables you to shut down resources while you are not using them to decrease the cost, while PaaS is always running unless you drop and re-create your resources when they are needed.
PaaS options reduce the amount of time that you need to invest to administer the database. However, it also limits the range of custom administration tasks and scripts that you can perform or run. For example, the CLR is not supported with SQL Database but is supported for an instance of SQL Managed Instance. Also, no deployment options in PaaS support the use of trace flags.
Both IaaS and PaaS provide high, industry-standard SLA. The PaaS option guarantees 99.99% SLA, while IaaS guarantees 99.95% SLA for infrastructure, meaning that you need to implement additional mechanisms to ensure the availability of your databases. You can attain 99.99% SLA by creating an additional SQL virtual machine and implementing the SQL Server Always On availability group high availability solution.
SQL Server on Azure VM is the exact match of your environment, so migration from on-premises to the Azure VM is no different from moving the databases from one on-premises server to another. SQL Managed Instance also enables easy migration; however, there might be some changes that you need to apply before your migration.
Application Architecture
Outcome
Higher SLAs with Azure SQL Managed and SQL Database
Multiple ways to do the Performance optimization
Azure SQL Database is always up to date
Single console to manage all configuration of SQL server
Cost-saving option for Azure SQL