Tim Radney reports on a new Standard tier preview for Azure SQL Database:
Previously, the Standard tier only offered 4 levels: 15, 30, 50, and 100 DTUs, with a database size limit of 250GB, with standard disk. If you had a database that was larger than 250GB, however did not need more than 100 DTUs for CPU, memory, or I/O, you were stuck paying a Premium price just for database size. With the new changes, you can now have up to a 1TB database in the Standard tier; you just have to pay the extra storage. Currently storage is being billed at $0.085/GB during the preview. Increasing from the included size of 250GB to 1TB increases by 774GB at a cost of $65.79 per month.
The new Standard preview DTU sizes support 200, 400, 800, 1,600, and 3,000 DTU options. If you have a SQL Server database workload that is more CPU-bound than I/O, these Standard tier options have the potential to save you a lot of money; however, if your workload is I/O bound, the Premium tier is going to outperform the Standard tier.
Tim follows this up with a couple of quick demos.