Reitse Eskens continues a series on performance comparisons for Azure SQL DB:
This tier is more expensive than the basic, but starting at 12 euro’s per month up to 3723 euro’s you have a wider range of spending your money and with that a wider performance range. The standard tier is suited for general purpose workloads and can be compared with the general purpose tier whereas the latter works with cores. Standard tier works with DTU’s. The concept of a DTU is a difficult one as the documentation states it’s a blend of CPU, Memory, reads and writes. If you hit a limitation, you’ll be throttled. You can read more about the DTU model here.
One thing I wish Reitse had done in the images was to show them in log scale—there’s a consistent L curve for each (which is good) but makes it hard to see anything after about Standard S4.